We are all failures – at least, all the best of us are. – J.M. Barrie

As a society, what keeps us from creating anything worthwhile?

FEAR.

Rock climbing requires a tremendous amount of focus by keeping your emotions in check in the ever present fear of falling to your death. If don’t control your fear you die, it’s that simple! For climbers falling isn’t failing, falling is just part of succeeding. In innovation the idea of failure is being wrong.

Compared to business where losing your money and your pride is not the same as losing your life, this seems crazy. Yet in business where we have so much more freedom to do great things we still choose to take the safe route. Not innovation just more of the same…

Innovation is tied to failure but it’s not tied to death. Why do we fear innovation then?

Think about it, will you lose your life in business? In the short term you might lose comforts but in the long term what you gain from failure is a sharpened sense of freedom. To do as you wish and not letting others set rules by which you have to operate. Innovation is freedom to do as you wish. Thinking about what you want to see in the world and then going out and creating it, that’s innovation.

A great many people in the history of humanity have pushed fear out of their system and went on to create the world we know see, hear, taste, feel, smell and use. The fear of being wrong, the fear of losing, the fear of rejection. All of these contribute to closing ourselves from the limitless potential each of us has to changing the world.

When you learn to accept that fear is present in all of us, a big door is open and you’ll see the world through a different set of eyes. And when you get to this point you’ll realize that you don’t have to wait for permission to innovate, you can take matter into your own hands.

UNDERSTAND: Failure is often an idea, not an outcome that stands in the way of successes. The greatest enemy we have as humans is fear. Root it out of your system as soon as you can, attack it. Don’t just do it for you, do it for humanity because we need innovation.

P.S. If you’re serious about ‘taking on your fears’, I recommend you read The 50th Law by Robert Greene and 50 Cent. This book follows 50 Cent’s journey from a drug dealer to the person he is right now, once you read it you’ll see 50 in a whole different light!

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A few days ago I found myself reading one of the many posts out there about X reasons why brands refuse to embrace social media. The truth is many companies are already irrelevant because they fail to see the world as continuously evolving.

First it’s important to understand that as humans we are taught to see everything as a phase because it makes it easier for us to make sense of things by being able to separate one event from the others. The problem with this way of thinking is it tries to make everything predictable in the short term by not focusing on the long term consequences.

Win today and don’t worry about tomorrow.

Adaptability requires a you to see events as continuous, not linear. For an adaptable company change is always happening, not just between events. The objective of being adaptable is to be able to win as many times as possible but not worry about winning every single battle.

Stories abound of companies that became irrelevant because they failed to adapt, choosing to follow a predictable death. Most of these companies waited until chaos arrived to make adjustments and others clinged to the past. Why wait until chaos comes knocking on your door, adaptability is the most crucial skill you’ll ever need and it should be part of your strategy because if you don’t adapt you’re already irrelevant.

Action step:

An exercise that always works wonders is showing people a vision where they no longer exist because they failed to adapt. Try it yourself, grab a few people from your office and ask them about the challenges facing your business:

• What they’re most afraid of?
• What keeps them up at night?

If they don’t have a clear answer for both, you’re already in trouble because you’re sitting in a very comfortable position and nothing is challenging your business.

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What do you think? What actions do you take to make your business adaptable?

Last night I went to the premier of Michael Jackson’s This is it. In the movie you’re looking at a creative genius at work but you’re also looking at the world through his eyes. It’s a great movie to watch if you a MJ fan because he WAS going to put on show!

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Although there are many things we can take away from MJ, there is something a friend of mine said tome after it was over that got me thinking. The Billie Jean performance is Michael at his best.

In his own words:

When I see MJ you don’t need to live abroad or to go visit new places to get in your inventive or creative mood… INNOVATION comes from INSPIRATION, it comes from INSIDE.
Just like a little kid, who makes out of a simple box, castles, dungeons, towers with trapped princesses inside or secret passages, MJ takes in all of his surroundings and transforms them into a work of art.
Just as he did once, with just A SIMPLE BOX, a GLOVE and A HAT.

MJ’s creative toolbox consists of a box with a hat and a glove and the best dance moves in the business. That’s it! Simple as that!

Anyone can put on a hat, a glove and dance but MJ makes the hat and glove all part of the dance, the performance. They become an extension of himself, his persona.

The whole key is he never lost his ability to astonish. Our inner child needs to be nourished, and see what no one else sees. We must never lose our ability to astonish ourselves.

So ask yourself, in my business what would be equal to the box, glove and hat I can use to create a memorable experience?

A key to implementing a kick-ass business strategy is doing what others are unwilling to do, this is shifts the rules to your advantage.

It seems to me that businesses are only focused on what they want but not what their customers want. Profit over brand is a ruling mindset! If you find yourself in a market where this is the case, make it your mission to compete by making your customers happy and make your competition irrelevant.

Your competitors will be trying to figure your strategy out and since they can’t think of making customers happy as a strategy (it’s not logical?), they won’t be able to compete! They’ll think you’re out of your mind.

The best strategy is to have none, the best strategy is to behave in way that makes your customers better off. Make them happy, that’s your greatest sources of infinite advantage.

It’s as simple as that!

If you don’t believe me, a perfect example of a company that makes their customer happy is Apple. People wet their pants before they get to touch the products themselves!

If you want your customers to salivate over you, give them what they want and exceed their expectations.

Got this short but powerful 3 minute video in my email last night and I thought I post in the morning for readers to get a boost in their day. I hope you have a powerful day!

What are the personal characteristics of successful innovators?

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According to some new research by Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen which included a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews they found five ‘discovery skills’ that distinguish them.

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1. Associating. Most successful innovators tend to be very good at seeing connections between seemingly disparate ideas.
2. Questioning. The ability to ask "what if", "why", and "why not" questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture.
3. Observation. Attention to details, most notably in other people’s behavior.
4. Experiment. Universal Remote ipod
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   Always try new things by constantly exploring new worlds.

5. Networking. Ability to talk and learn from people they have nothing in common with.

Let’s call this the innovators code.

Why are people afraid of failure? Failure’s not just part of life, it’s essential to life — and to success. Henry Ford put it most eloquently: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently”. You can’t learn if you don’t fail.

The fact is all people will fail more than a few times in our lives.

We tend to learn more from our mistakes than our successes. At our best, we turn them to our advantage. Thomas Edison once said, "I make more mistakes than anyone I know. And eventually I patent them."

Failure is an essential ingredient of innovation — if companies are risk averse, they’ll never develop breakthrough products or create new markets.

The value in failure is the fact that the more you fail — if you treat failure the right way — the more you succeed. The point is to turn failure into learning by not making the same mistake twice.

According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, coping with failure is a mindset problem:

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If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.

Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.

If you don’t risk failure, you’re not trying hard enough.

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Like most people I get a haircut every 3 to 4 weeks before I start looking like a monkey. I’ve been cutting my hair with the same barber for the last 18 years so it was to my surprise this morning that I got a new added benefit

The Voyage That Shook the World trailer for getting a haircut…a massage!

Yup, that’s right a massage.

Using what looks like a motorized hand shaker attached to his hand with a soft pouch in the palm of his hand he rubs your arms, hands, neck, head, shoulders and back.

Things like these make a whole of a lot of difference in the haircut experience. Getting a haircut is a relaxing experience, especially when the barber uses the shaving knife to slash the hair off the back of my neck…it just feels great. Now add a massage at the end and you get people leaving looking and feeling fresh!

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The barbers got the idea after one of them built the strap-on-hand-shaker to give massages to himself and then one of the clients suggested he should give clients massages after their haircut.

The barber says that they’ve just recently started giving massages and says that so far clients have liked it (who wouldn’t!) and leave with big smiles in their faces.

As a business owner, you want your clients to have big smiles on their faces all the time.

Key takeaway.

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…it got me talking and even wrote this post about a simple haircut!

“I often say that I’ve learned but one thing in 40 years, since I began my management career. … And that is … “try stuff” … faster than the next guy.”
– Tom Peters

At it’s core innovation is a numbers game. You have to ensure that your innovation pipeline has a large number of ideas coming in at the front end in order to yield an adequate number of successes at the back end.

You have to accept that for every 100 ideas 10 will merit a small scale experiment, and of those, only 1 or 2 will turn out to be successes.

The truth is experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo.

Examples of experimental innovators abound, here are a few examples that we can learn from:

Play the odds with volume and frequency

Kevin Nalty is a YouTube celebrity and created an entry on Google Knol on how to get popular on YouTube. Here’s his take on how to make videos that don’t suck:

This chapter sounds arrogant, and its somewhat hypocritical. Because I make so many videos, many of them suck. If anyone should have the ?magic recipe? for a decent online video, it should be me. But I’m still learning each day, and that’s part of what makes it so fun to create videos. People often ask me why I don’t focus on creating fewer quality videos instead of posting routinely. There are two reasons for that. First, if I stop creating for more than a few days, I generally don’t feel like posting anymore. Second, I have no Earthly idea which of my video ideas will resonate and which will become popular. There are a lot of factors involved, so I play the odds with volume and frequency.

Testing beats guessing

Ebay, one of the most popular websites on the web, gets huge amounts of people coming the site everyday looking to buy and sell stuff. Knowing what all these users want is important, converting most of the users is Ebay’s most critical activity. A recent article from Harvard on how to design smart business experiments (registration needed) explains how Ebay built it’s own application called the Ebay Experimentation Platform to lead testers through the process of testing pages in the website and to keep track of what’s being tested at what times on what pages.

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Consider Chris Rock, the popular comedian, who uses small experiments as part of his process:

First, he picks small venues where he can do rapid, low-risk experiments with new material. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small venue called the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. Rock told the Orange Country Register, “It’s like boxing training camp. I always pick a comedy club to work out in.”

In front of audiences of say 30 to 40 people, Rock will bring a yellow legal note pad with lots of joke ideas scribbled on it, according to fellow comedian Matt Ruby. In sets that run say 45 minutes, many of the jokes will fall flat, but according to Ruby, “There were 5-10 lines during the night that were just ridiculously good. Like lightning bolts. My sense is that he starts with these bolts and then writes around them.”

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Fail fast, fail cheap, and move on to the real winners

A recent example of a company investing incrementally in a new market is Dell’s agreement to sell PCs in Wal-Mart stores.

Rather than sell the entire line of Dell PCs in stores, it conducted a test, offering only a select few models in many stores, providing Dell valuable information about its mass appeal.

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There’s simply no way around it, your chance of finding the next big opportunity is largely a function of how many seeds you sow and how many new things you try.

The great thing about the web is how easy it is to try something new. Experiments can be frequent and small and the best can be built into something big.

Talent is overrated argues Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: The Story of Success Heartbreakers release . Although I have yet to read the book I’m fascinated by the idea behind the 10,000 hours needed to master a skill. Gladwell argues that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice.

“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

The real path to great performance and therefore success is a matter of choice. Practice makes perfect indeed. Just make sure you practice on the things you’re passionate about.

Gladwell’s new book is generating a lot of buzz with countless interviews picking his brain:

• Slate Magazine 4 part discussion of Outliers
• Fortune Magazine Secrets of Success
• Gladwell’s Outliers website interview
• NY Mag Why we have little control over our success

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For a real treat check out Fortune Magazine’s Why Talent is Overrated article from last month. It’s not about Malcolm Gladwell’s book but about the principle of deliberate practice. Uptown Girls movies District 9 psp The essence of deliberate practice is to stretch an individual beyond his or her current abilities. With examples of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, Chris Rock, Giants Quarterback Eli Manning to name a few you’ll find this a good read.