The Great Innovators

Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas

December 13, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When Hewlett-Packard (HP) Norway appointed Anita Krohn Traaseth managing director in 2012, she implemented a “speed date the boss” program. She invited every employee from every organization level for an informal, five-minute conversation based on three themes. She encouraged people to bring their big ideas on innovating individually and collectively.

Who are you, and what do you do at HP?

Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on?

What do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? Or, do you have a talent or skill you don’t get to use now in your position?

Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas - Speed Date the Boss

Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Krohn Traaseth’s initiative defined the roadmap for her tenure. It pushed HP to become one of Norway’s top workplaces within three years. HP Norway improved every major organizational performance measure, such as staff turnover, customer satisfaction, top-line growth, and bottom-line performance.

Not only that, her discussions uncovered that there were 30 skilled musicians on her payroll. HP Norway formed a band, which played live to 1,800 company executives in Barcelona in 2013, gaining better visibility to her Norwegian outpost.

Following Krohn Traaseth’s success, other HP divisions and employers have now introduced the concept of ‘Speed Date the Boss’ initiatives in other countries.

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Krohn Traaseth’s program was so successful because, as the top boss, she showed that she was willing to listen. She also openly modeled her willingness to listen to her management teams and foster their engagement.

When employees see the boss willing to receive honest feedback and no one’s head rolls, they’re more likely to speak up.
Soliciting ideas directly from employees individually, rather than holding brainstorms, takes the edge off group dynamics. Group settings aren’t where all employees feel free to share their best–and bold—ideas.
Rank-and-file employees can be a great source of innovation if only their leaders listen to them. Organizational innovation doesn’t have to trickle top-down or emanate from the R&D team. The best way to produce great ideas is to start by generating many ideas. Encourage everyone on your team to think, contribute, and participate.

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PS: Anita Krohn Traaseth is now the CEO of Innovation Norway, a state-sponsored project focused on promoting innovation and economic development. She’s the author of Good Enough for the Bastards (2014,) a Norwegian version of Sheryl Sandberg‘s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013.)

Cf: See my guide on preparing an action plan at a new job by collecting the expectations of all the people with whom your new role interacts.

How to See Opportunities Your Competition Doesn’t

November 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Harvard strategy professor Youngme Moon’s Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (2010) describes how many companies pursue the same opportunities that every other company is chasing and thus miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing.

In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become … Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.

Moon argues that the companies and brands that see a different game win big. Such innovators don’t just try to outcompete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they redefine the competitive landscape by embracing unique ideas in a world crammed with me-too thinking.

European airline Ryanair unleashed a new wave of relentless cost- and price-leadership by charging customers extra for everything beyond a seat itself. If you want to check a bag, you pay extra. If you want an airport agent to check you in and print your boarding pass, you pay extra. If you want food and drink, you pay extra. Later on, Spirit Airlines took the price-obsession further by charging for carry-on bags too. After a rough rollout and customer defiance, paying for carry-on bags has become the new normal.

Idea for Impact: Being different is what makes all the difference. If you do things the same way everyone else in your field does things, why would you expect to do any better? What are you doing to raise your game—not just to stay in place, but to get ahead?

Lessons from Airline Entrepreneur David Neeleman: Staff Your Weaknesses

November 8, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Airline serial entrepreneur David Neeleman has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD.) School was torture. He couldn’t focus, and he procrastinated constantly.

“I felt like I should be out doing things, moving things along, but here I was, stuck studying statistics, which I knew had no application to my life,” Neeleman once said. “I knew I had to have an education, but at the first opportunity to start a business, I just blew out of college.”

Despite his own struggles, Neeleman went on to build a stellar business career in the airline industry. He started Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue Airways, Azul Brazilian Airlines, and Breeze Airways. He’s even led the revival of TAP Air Portugal.

Through it all, Neeleman made the best of his strengths—original thinking, high energy, and the ability to draw the best out in people.

Lessons from Airline Entrepreneur David Neeleman: Staff Your Weaknesses

Far from lamenting his ADHD, David Neeleman celebrated it

Early on, Neeleman realized that he must manage his ADHD carefully. Throughout his career, he got help with his weaknesses.

People with ADHD tend to possess rare talents and gifts. They can be extraordinarily creative and original. They display ingenuity, and they encourage that trait in others. They can improvise well under pressure.

However, ADHD confers disadvantages too. People with ADHD are likely to be incredibly forgetful, disorganized, impulsive, and hyperactive. They drag their feet and miss deadlines. Their performance can be inconsistent. They can drift away mentally unless, oddly enough, they’re under stress or handling multiple inputs.

Sadly, modern society (including parents, schools, workplaces, and career counselors) tends to linger upon the negative symptoms and encourages people with ADHD to learn to cope with them. Strengths are more likely to go unnoticed.

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your weaknesses stop you from reaching your life goals.

In your work-life and outside, seek environments that allow you to bring more of your strengths to play. But don’t ignore your weaknesses (or the downsides of your strengths.)

Staff your weaknesses. Identify two or three key job activities that you don’t do well. Determine how you can delegate those responsibilities to others or seek help. This way, your weaknesses don’t become the Achilles heel that can hamper the strengths that make you effective.

How Jeff Bezos is Like Sam Walton

November 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Jeff Bezos is Like Sam Walton

Walmart founder Sam Walton’s brilliant autobiography, Made in America (my summary,) was published a few weeks before his death in 1992. The penultimate page reads,

Could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands of someones—with good enough ideas to go all the way. It will be done again—over and over, providing that someone wants it badly enough to do what it takes to get there. It’s all a matter of attitude and the capacity to constantly study and question the management of the business.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon just two years later. After eight years on Wall Street, Bezos dreamt up Amazon during a drive from New York to Seattle in 1994. His wife (now ex-wife) MacKenzie drove, and Jeff “tapped out a business plan on his computer along the way.”

Amazon began as a loss-making book e-tailer at the dawn of the commercial Internet and as the dot-com poster child in the late ’90s. It has since evolved into one of the world’s most valuable companies. Amazon has come a long way from its genesis as the curse of bricks-and-mortar booksellers and has diversified broadly into just about every adjacent business it could get its hands on.

Bezos’s and Amazon’s dominant leadership values echo those of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart: frugality, a bias for action, long-term focus, motivating staff to think like owners, and customer obsession.

The Everything Store (2013,) Brad Stone’s excellent chronicle of the rise of Amazon, notes, “In his autobiography, Walmart’s founder expounds on the principles of discount retailing and discusses his core values of frugality and a bias for action—a willingness to try a lot of things and make many mistakes. Bezos included both in Amazon’s corporate values.” On an earnings call, Bezos famously declared, “there are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be in the second, full-stop.”

All along, Bezos has made big bet-decisions that hurt it in the short term but created value in the long term. Amazon’s market capitalization has rocketed up from $4.55 billion in 2001 to $1.08 trillion before the Coronavirus/COVID-19 infected the stock markets. Amazon’s secret, in Bezos’s words, is,

We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to something else. And they prefer to be close-followers rather than inventors, because it’s safer. So if you want to capture the truth about Amazon, that is why we are different.

Amazon has not been consistently profitable over the years, and that is a deliberate upshot of how Bezos approaches business. Amazon cycles through periods of substantial investments that beget future revenue growth (with low profits) and periods of increasing profits as its investments ebb.

Bezos has maneuvered Wall Street into believing that he is just getting started—his “Day 1” philosophy has become something of a legend. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent … and very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,” Bezos asserted at Amazon’s 2011 annual shareholders meeting.

Not all of Bezos’s bets have succeeded. However, investors have come to acknowledge that his long-term initiatives will produce rich results several years down the road. Little wonder, then, that Amazon’s stock has defied short-termism by continually progressing upward even during quarters of little or no earnings.

Postscript: Bezos has been, until recently, the world’s wealthiest person since about 2018. Walton was the richest man from 1985 until his death in 1992. His inheritors, the Walton family, are collectively more affluent than Bezos!

Seek a Fresh Pair of Eyes

October 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Seek a Fresh Pair of Eyes---Get a New Perspective

When was the last time your team stopped to ask, “Why”?

“Why are we doing this?”

“Why are we doing it that way?”

You can ask this important question about everything—in your business or life!

We humans are creatures of habit—unquestioned and unexamined. Unless you intentionally ask “why,” you’ll just do things the same way because that the default mode for how you’ve always done it, or that’s how somebody showed you.

Once you’re set in your habits, keep scrutinizing them.

The best improvement ideas often come from people who aren’t stuck in the established ways.

Encourage new hires and interns to challenge the “that’s just how things are done around here” mentality when they disagree with it. Until they’ve been housetrained, they’re the ones with the freshest perspective.

Ask them to make a note of everything that they see and doesn’t make sense. After a few weeks, when they’ve become familiar with the organization and its workflow, have them reassess their initial opinions, reflect, and report their observations. Invite them to spend time on the internet looking for how these things are done at other companies and provide suggestions for improvement.

Idea for Impact: Sometimes people are too close to things to see the truth. To get a new perspective on the status quo, seek a fresh pair of eyes.

How to Bring Your Ideas to Life

October 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can evolve into a helpful innovation. I’ve previously drawn attention to this aspect of the creative process in my 3M Post-it Note case study.

Another notable example of what transforms ideas into innovation is the “discovery” of penicillin and its curative effect on infectious diseases.

Alexander Fleming Late to Penicillin

The Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. More specifically, Fleming found that a specific mold produced penicillin. This substance was previously known to inhibit the growth of bacteria.

In 1928, Fleming was working on cultures of Staphylococcus, a bacterium that induces blood poisoning. Upon returning from a vacation, he saw a discarded Petri dish that he had left behind without sterilizing. It had a zone around an invading fungus where his bacterium culture didn’t grow. A mold spore from another lab in Fleming’s building had unexpectedly fallen on one of his cultures. The spore had spread over the Petri dish while Fleming was away. Instead of throwing the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as Penicillium chrysogenum, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.

Fleming suggested his discovery might be used as an antiseptic in wounds. He published an account of this work in 1929. However, he couldn’t find a way of extracting enough penicillin needed to be curative enough without it becoming ineffective.

In itself, Fleming’s discovery was thus not a substantial leap in terms of penicillin’s use as a pharmaceutical. After Fleming’s discovery, penicillin proved unstable and difficult to produce in pure form for almost a decade. It took two Oxford University scientists, Sir Howard Walter Florey and Dr. Ernst Boris Chain, to realize its full potential only in the 1940s. They showed how to prepare penicillin in usable form and demonstrated that it could be favorably applied to the treatment of disease.

How to Bring Your Ideas to Life From the time when its medical application was established, penicillin has saved millions of lives by stopping the growth of the bacteria responsible for poisoning the blood and causing many once-fatal diseases. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine to recognize their complementary achievements.

Idea for Impact: Often, there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the original creator can’t bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to others who can evaluate and trial the discovery in new contexts.

In other words, the creative process doesn’t end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications.

Rules Are Made to Be Broken // Summary of Francesca Gino’s ‘Rebel Talent’

August 9, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rebels have a bad rep. When you think of them, you imagine trouble. However, all rebels really do is take the habits that could hold the rest of us back and break them.

Instead of leaning toward the comfortable and the familiar, rebels ask questions and look at problems from unexpected perspectives. They aren’t afraid to question assumptions, stick their necks out, make themselves vulnerable in front of others, or experiment and fail.

Harvard social scientist Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life (2018) aims to explain the merits of breaking the rules and showing how to see challenges from new perspectives.

When we challenge ourselves to move beyond what we know and can do well, we rebel against the comfortable cocoon of the status quo, improving ourselves and positioning ourselves to contribute more to our partners, coworkers, and organizations.

The anecdotes and case studies that Gino pulls together to illuminate her “rebel talent” narrative are hardly convincing. In fact, they’re no more than examples of creative—perhaps unconventional—thinking. To take a prominent example Gino cites in the book, Captain Sully Sullenberger (of the US Airways Flight 1549 incident) did nothing rebellious. With 40 years of flying experience and situational awareness, he made lightning-quick decisions to land in the Hudson and not return to a nearby airport.

Recommendation: Read the introduction of Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent, and skim the rest. The book’s introduction has a few useful concepts that merit an article, but the book lacks the rigor and utility to be expected from a Harvard Business School professor. The key takeaways (codified as the “eight principles of rebel leadership”) are relatively clear-cut: be curious and open-minded, never be satisfied, embrace discomfort, think unconventionally, and break established norms.

‘Follow Your Passion’ is Really Bad Career Advice

May 17, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of Our Greatest Literary Stylists Was a Full-time Business Executive

Wallace Stevens - Insurance Executive Wallace Stevens, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated poets, was a full-time insurance executive for The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The son of a wealthy lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard, where he became recognized on campus as a prolific and multitalented writer. He moved to New York City to become a poet. His father was a lover of literature but was also prudent. He disapproved of Stevens’ literary aspirations and directed his son to cease writing and study the law.

Stevens eventually caved to his family’s pressure and went to New York University Law School. He practiced law at several New York firms for more than a decade before becoming an insurance lawyer and executive.

Stevens wrote most of his poetry on his daily two-mile walks to and from work: “I write best when I can concentrate, and do that best while walking.” He would take slips of paper in his pockets and jot down words. His secretary would type them up for him.

Despite the job demands, Stevens produced a fantastic body of imaginative work in his spare time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955 for Collected Poems (1954.)

A Paycheck Comes First

Artists of all kinds have kept their jobs their entire lives. Among just the writers,

T. S. Eliot did some of his best work while employed at Lloyds Bank in London.
Two-time Poet Laureate Ted Kooser was also an insurance executive for much of his career. He would get up early, write poems for an hour and a half, and then go to work.
Pulitzer winner A. R. Ammons was a sales executive at his father-in-law’s scientific glass firm.
Richard Eberhart, another Pulitzer winner, worked at the Butcher Polish Company, his wife’s family’s floor wax business.
Poet Laureate James Dickey started his career at an advertising agency to “make some bucks.” A copywriter, he worked on the Coca-Cola and Lay’s Potato Chips accounts. He famously said, “I was selling my soul to the devil all day… and trying to buy it back at night.”
William Carlos Williams was a doctor in New Jersey practicing pediatrics and general medicine.
Novelist Henry Darger was a custodian at a Chicago hospital.
Harvey Pekar was a VA Hospital clerk in Cleveland. He held this job even after becoming famous. Until he retired in 2001, he declined all promotions.
Jules Verne was an agent de change (a broker) on the Paris Bourse. He woke up early each morning to write before going for the day’s work.
Novelist Jodi Picoult worked at an ad agency and a financial analyst, a textbook editor, and an eighth-grade teacher. She wrote her first novel when she was pregnant with her first daughter.

Follow Your Passion is Really Bad Career Advice

Disregard the Inspirational Mumbo Jumbo

Each of these authors had ambitions to be a writer but didn’t think they could earn a living at it initially. They started working as a means to an end. At the same time, they plodded away at writing, honing their craft, trying to appeal to readers, and refusing to stop trying because of their ambition and passion.

The boilerplate career advice “Do what you love and the money will follow” is aspirational but hardly practicable. Plenty of people are passionate about their craft, but few people can turn those passions into an actual paycheck.

Many people want to “do what they love” and specialize in, say, 17th-century Metaphysical poetry, get disheartened when there aren’t a lot of job positions available in that field, let alone that narrow area of expertise.

Pursue a passion but as a hobby. Work at it, and until you can find people who’ll like your work well enough to pay you for what you love to do, get a day job that’s acceptable and pays reasonably well. A steady professional income will take the pressure off. You’ll still be pursuing what you love, and, hopefully, someday, you can make a full career of it.

For now, though, let the money follow, if only from a different source.

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a Passion, But Don’t Expect to Make it a Career Right Away

Follow Your Passion - Disregard the Inspirational Career Advice To follow a passion, go get a day job. Think of it as your side gig. Then make time to cultivate your passions. When you’re good at something that people are likely to want, the money will come.

Despite the well-meaning counsel to follow your passion, the truth is, it’s easier to pursue your passion and achieve your dreams if you can afford to work free. Until then, seek the peace of mind that comes from being able to pay your bills and attaining financial stability.

Tweets, Egos, and Double-Crosses: Summary of Nick Bilton’s ‘Hatching Twitter’

April 26, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I spent the weekend reading New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton’s captivating Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (2013.) This tome exposes the dark side of Twitter’s tense founding and the relationships amongst the company’s four founders, Evan Williams (@Ev,) Jack Dorsey (@Jack,) Biz Stone (@Biz,) and Noah Glass (@Noah.)

Personal ambitions unleashed a barrage of backstabbing

This motley crew of four San Francisco transplants chanced upon one another when trying to make it in Silicon Valley and became close friends. They started Twitter in 2006 as a side project at Odeo, an ailing podcasting business bankrolled by Evan Williams. With an appealing—albeit frenzied—startup idealism and naïvete, they forged ahead with the notion of a platform that offered everybody an equal voice in 140 characters.

However, when Twitter (a social media giant with over 206 million daily active users worldwide) began to gain traction as a status-sharing service, tensions quickly emerged between the co-founders. The four founders came to blows over just what Twitter was supposed to be and for the right to be recognized as having conceived it.

Lesson #1 from Twitter’s founding: Never mix business and friendship

The Twitter team’s infighting almost tore the microblogging company apart on more than one occasion in its early days. There was even acrimony over who got to sit by First Lady Michelle Obama at a Time 100 Most Influential People soiree.

Noah Glass, the “forgotten founder,” championed it initially and conceived Twitter’s name. Awkwardly, he was booted out before the startup even incorporated. He was left empty-handed from the contraption he had built and fought for when it was still an idea.

Biz Stone, the tactician and go-between, threatened to quit out of disgust with the infighting.

Hatching Twitter is particularly sympathetic to Evan Williams. He bankrolled Twitter as a fork of Odeo. He pivoted Twitter as a means for talking about what is happening in the world. Williams goaded it to prominence simultaneously as he tried in vain to keep Dorsey’s egotism in check.

Lesson #2 from Twitter’s Founding: Self-sabotage can undermine your hard work

For Jack Dorsey, Twitter was always about telling other people what you were doing and making them feel less alone. Williams chose Dorsey as CEO when Twitter formally became its own company. However, their relationship quickly soured. Dorsey failed to address Twitter’s early technical flaws, even as he took plenty of time to pursue hobbies outside of work. Twitter’s venture investors and Williams ultimately overthrew Dorsey.

Dorsey got bitter and launched another startup called Square (it’s now a thriving digital payments company.) Exploiting the public confusion about his role as Twitter’s chairman (albeit without a vote on the board,) Dorsey went on a media blitz to promote himself as Twitter’s sole inventor and the platform’s real brain.

Author Bilton makes Twitter’s founders seem so inept that one marvels at how the company got anywhere. But even as Dorsey and Williams squabbled, Twitter’s users set in motion a cultural phenomenon through retweets, @replies, and #hashtags. These three precepts gave Twitter its unique depth, scope, and versatility.

Later on, Williams got the boot in a coup d’etat orchestrated by a guileful Dorsey. He returned as Twitter’s executive chairman alongside a new chief executive. Dick Costolo, a former professional comic, made Twitter a revenue-earning business and steered it to an IPO.

Twitter Founders - Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass

Lesson #3 from Twitter’s Founding: Distribute credit—There’s plenty to go around

Interpersonal conflicts are the black ice of startups. Individual styles and priorities that are at odds with other founders can cause much drama in entrepreneurship. At the startup companies that I’ve been involved in, rifts have often forced co-founders to press mediators into their service and learn how to embrace conflict and establish boundaries.

When things are going well at any startup, everyone’s too busy to have much to disagree about. When the startup hits the skids, disputes pop up even where you’d least expect them. Some 65% of startups are suspected of failing because of interpersonal tensions within the founding team.

Hatching Twitter excels in shining a light not just on the founders’ conflicting personalities but how their individual dispositions affected what Twitter became:

Jack had the germ of the idea, of people sharing their status … Without Noah’s vision of a service that could connect people who felt alone, and a name that people would remember, Twitter would never exist. It was Ev who insisted on making Twitter about ‘what’s happening .’.. and without Biz’s ethical stance … Twitter would be a very different company.

Hatching Twitter, The Company That Almost Wasn’t

Recommendation: Quick-read Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter (2013.) It’s a fast-paced, entertaining back-story to how Twitter was founded and the drama caused by its founders’ personality conflicts and all the alliances and ousters and betrayals.

Nick Bilton tells an exciting saga of rivalries turning to fallings-out, hubris unfolding. As great wealth is built and lost, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg notes, “[Twitter is] such as mess—it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” Bilton is gossipy, and his narrative tends to theatrical—an undeniable fodder for an inevitable Hollywood adaptation.

Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

April 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Arthur Fry conceived the Post-It to bookmark the songs in hymnal In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver: Inventors of the Post-it Note The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Creativity---It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the Post-it Note

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

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The Great Innovators

Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Far from lamenting his ADHD, David Neeleman celebrated it

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your weaknesses stop you from reaching your life goals.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Once you’re set in your habits, keep scrutinizing them.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

One of Our Greatest Literary Stylists Was a Full-time Business Executive

A Paycheck Comes First

Disregard the Inspirational Mumbo Jumbo

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a Passion, But Don’t Expect to Make it a Career Right Away

Wondering what to read next?

Personal ambitions unleashed a barrage of backstabbing

Lesson #1 from Twitter’s founding: Never mix business and friendship

Lesson #2 from Twitter’s Founding: Self-sabotage can undermine your hard work

Lesson #3 from Twitter’s Founding: Distribute credit—There’s plenty to go around

Hatching Twitter, The Company That Almost Wasn’t

Wondering what to read next?

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Wondering what to read next?