"Sadly, too often creativity is smothered rather than nurtured. There has to be a climate in which new ways of thinking, perceiving, questioning are encouraged.”
I read a great post today from Seth Godin. Read full post here.
But what about you and your organization? As you get bigger and older, are you busy ensuring that a bad thing won’t happen that might upset your day, or are you aggressively investing in having a remarkable thing happen that will delight or move a customer?
Here’s a rule that’s so inevitable that it’s almost a law: As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.
I read a great post today from Crestock’s blog and had to share it. This article makes some great points that work in and out of the Church world. To read the whole post from the original site click here.
“From flash intros, to logo theft, to information overload, clients often ask a design team to do a lot of stuff that’s just plain wrong. Here are 7 of the most common mistakes clients might ask you to make — and how to talk some sense into them.
Too Much Information
The problem: The average client seems to have never heard the old adage: less is more. No matter what you’re designing, they’ll want to add more copy, links, calls-to-action, logos, headers, footers, global nav elements and 1-800 numbers. Part of the problem is that they think that if it’s there, their customers will read it. And sometimes part of the problem is that they’re balancing the needs of fifteen different divisions within their company, who all want some of that prime screen real-estate on whatever you’re designing.
How to fight back: Ask them what they want the design to accomplish, not what it should contain. No matter what you’re designing, it should have a purpose. Whether it’s a poster, product packaging or a corporate homepage, the design should serve to accomplish something for the person who will ultimately be viewing it. Once you’re discussing what a viewer needs from the design (rather than what the company wants it to contain) you’re on the right track to reducing the amount of information to only that which is necessary.
The “Long Neck Theory” by Gerry McGovern states that every website has a very short list of “killer tasks” that visitors to the site want to accomplish. His testing indicates that just 5% of content, which serve those killer tasks, is used by at least 25% of visitors to a site. And past that key 5%, the vast majority of the rest of the content is only useful to a tiny percentage of people. Which means that not every little bit of content on a site needs prominent placement.”
You’ve heard the parable about the boiled frogs right? If you stick a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out or at least try to. If you stick the frog in room temperature water and gradually begin to increase the water temperature the frog won’t move. Even once the water starts to boil the frog won’t try and jump out. Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats is based on sudden changes in its environment not gradual ones.
This got me thinking about 2 things:
1. Sometimes it’s hard for us to see the gradual erosion in things as a real problem mostly because our internal apparatus typically responds to sudden changes like departmental blow ups, major decreases in attendance, broken pipes with water gushing out of them and stuff like that. It’s the gradual erosion of things that end up boiling the frogs though.
2. A scene from the movie “Dodgeball” with Vince Vaughn where Kate (the lawyer) is in Peter’s office discussing the future of Peter’s gym Average Joe’s:
Peter: Hang on a second, you’re saying this place here is in default?”
Kate: “No, you’re in foreclosure. You were in default during the six months we sent you delinquency notices.”
Peter: “I thought that those were just warnings.”
Kate: “They were warnings.”
Peter: “Well, no one warned me.”
If I can’t slow down enough to see erosion in my world/team/org/church/whatever, it’s probably because my internal apparatus for sensing a problem is based on sudden changes and not gradual ones.
In his book “Good to Great” Jim Collins explains that “good is the enemy of great.” He goes on to explain that all Great companies have a laser focus on 3 things. He called it the Hedgehog Concept. Read the book if you haven’t, believe me you’ll be thankful you did. But what are the implications of being focused? People don’t talk about that in meetings.
Of course it means saying Yes to the right thing but just as much or more as it does saying NO to the wrong things. Wait there’s more. That means you not only say NO to bad ideas but also have to say NO to a lot of good ideas so that the great idea can prevail. Steve Jobs put it well when he wrote:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
–Steve Jobs
Have you ever felt like you were able to identify what you needed to focus on but couldn’t quite get to it because you were too busy? It may be time to start saying NO.
In his article “In Pursuit of Elegance,” Guy Kawasaki present 12 tips to pursuing elegance. Here are a couple that really stood out to me. Read the entire article here.
Question: Why is elegance so important?
Answer: Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That’s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources.
Question: Why do companies with unlimited money continue to put out such crap?
Answer: I’m not sure anyone has unlimited money at the moment, but even those less worse off than others probably suffer from a dire lack of two things: discipline and discrimination. The enemies of elegance are (1) adding and (2) acting. The notion of subtraction goes against how we’re hardwired which is to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. We’re natural-born adders which is partly why elegance is so elusive. Whether we’re talking about a product, a performance, a market, or an organization, our addiction to addition results in inconsistency, overload, or waste—and sometimes all three.And here in the US we have a cowboy instinct, where the bias is for action. In other words, Don’t make me think, let me just do. Doing SOMETHING is deemed better than doing nothing. But that’s not always true. I spent some time with National Geographic adventure journalist Boyd Matson. He taught me how to stand still when the hippos charge. If you act, and run, you’re dead. Stand still, do nothing, they stop charging. But that is fiendishly difficult because it’s so unnatural and counterintuitive. But that’s what happens in business.
Question: What’s the first step a CEO should take to get her company on the right track?
Answer: When Fortune named Apple “America’s Most Admired Company” as well as “Most Admired for Innovation,” honors owing largely to the success of the iPhone, Steve Jobs revealed that a “stop-doing” strategy figured centrally into Apple’s approach. What he said was: “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”That’s the mindset.And step one? Create a solid stop-doing list. Sounds simple, but few do it. Guru Jim Collins says you absolutely must have a “stop-doing” list to accompany your to-do list. As a practical matter, he advises developing a strong discipline around first giving careful thought to prioritizing goals and objectives, and then eliminating the bottom 20 percent of the list. If as CEO you do that, and demand that everyone do that, including designers and engineers with respect to the stuff they’re building, your ugly crap quotient goes way down.
Larry Bossidy, CEO of AlliedSignal author of Execution, once wrote,
“The development of new leaders is not only the key to profitability, it is also very satisfying in terms of feeling like you’ve left a legacy, not just an income statement. The question is often asked, “How am I doing as a leader?” The answer is how the people you lead are doing. Do they learn? Do they manage conflict? Do they initiate changes? You won’t remember when you retire what you did in the first quarter of 1994. What you will remember, is how many people you developed.”
Our leadership will reflect in the vitality of our followers. So what do ya say, how long has it been since you or someone asked YOUR followers about how they are doing? Are they growing? Are they managing conflict? Are they initiating change? If the answer is an emphatic YES to all of those you get an A. If not, it’s time to realign.
