Archive for: July, 2011

To create, a person must…

The Paradoxes of Creativity posted on Google+ by creativity expert Roger Von Oech which state that to create, a person must:

  • Have knowledge but forget the knowledge.
  • See unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder.
  • Work hard but spend time doing nothing.
  • Create many ideas yet most of them are useless.
  • Look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different.
  • Desire success but learn how to fail.
  • Be persistent but not stubborn.
  • Listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
  • Understand that rules are important, and yet break them constantly.
  • Understand that good ideas must be relevant, yet constantly be thinking about irrelevancies.
  • In order to live a life of abundance, be free from desire for abundance.
  • Truth has many faces. Yesterday’s Truth can be today’s Untruth. And this is true.
  • Develop a sophisticated eye, but learn to see like a child.
  • For good ideas to come, you must be in control and yet not in control. You must try hard yet hardly try.
  • To create a person must reject conventions yet work within them.

 

Innovation posts of the week: How to think like an innovator

Innovate on Purpose: Why innovation can’t be benchmarked by @ovoinnovation
Think Like an Innovator – HBR
Tackling Complexity and Wicked Problems with Design Thinking by @ralph_ohr & @tdebaillon
The Case for Competitive Collaboration – Core77
Six Bite-Sized Innovation Lessons From Ebay’s New Design Think Tank – FastCo Design
Innovation’s Nine Critical Success Factors – HBR
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The customer/client is rarely right

We have a client in the in the personal finance industry that helps people get out of debt providing good credit repair services and for the past two months we have been managing and executing their social media strategy.

Part of this strategy is defining the content, branding and overall message you want to convey. This is key because it helps people determine what you stand for. At the beginning we told the client that his business had the perception of being a fraud. With so many businesses that claim to help one get out of debt we weren’t surprised.

Anyways, in order to break that pattern we decided that we would post only useful ‘how to get out of debt’ (not the type that’s on ezines) content through Twitter and Facebook, which is generally browsed by in debt people looking for how to make 2000 fast. My client did not agree with this idea, they wanted to post financial news (obvious to everyone else) from reputable sources. News that keep confirming how the world is going to end because our economy is still in the rut.

They think this is what people will be interested in reading. Well bo-ho! I questioned this assumption and fired back that people are already aware of this since there isn’t a day that goes by that we’re not reminded of it. Should we create more noise?

The simple half step principle for innovation

There’s a very interesting article on the history of camouflage in the Atlantic. It profiles one of it’s leading innovators, Guy Cramer, and a new concealment innovation called Quantum Camouflage.

Though the history of camouflage up to today is very cool, there is a paragraph I want to highlight regarding Guy Cramer’s thinking about innovation.

Innovation posts of the week: The Business Models Investors Prefer

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