JD Stewart MD (magic dude)

Author: JD Stewart

  • Trade Show Magicians Enhance Booth Traffic

    Professional trade show magicians can be a powerful tool in your trade show tool belt. They increase traffic at your trade show booth, as well as heighten awareness of your products to conference attendees.

    You should not think of a trade show magician simply as an entertainer. Because when you hire a trade show magician you are not hiring an entertainer. You are hiring another member of your sales staff. The time they spend is considerable prior to the show. They will spend time with you and your staff, to better understand your company and the goals for the trade show. Trade show magicians will then carefully select the tricks they will use that can illustrate you message with impact. They script their shows prior to the show with enough time for you to review and modify the script. This interaction allows you to be sure you will receive the maximum benefit of having a magician in your booth.

    An experienced trade show magician charges anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 a day, but the expense is well worth it because they provide a blend of sales and sleight of hand that bring prospective customers to your booth.

    Here is a common error. Assuming any entertainer can work your exhibit. All they need to do is draw a crowd. Drawing a crowd should not be your goal. The goal is getting the name and contact information of qualified leads. This requires the work of an experienced sales professional and entertainment professional not just an entertainer.

    Trade show magician

  • Networking for Innovation

    In an article on my site, entitled Creating an Innovative Culture I spoke about how some companies sabotage their innovation effects by not encouraging networking among  department and suppliers and customers. The reasons for encouraging a networking culture are numerous and obvious. No only for innovation and creativity but for simply maintaining business health. The idea of the lone ranger or isolated genius coming up with sparks of insight and creativity is no longer true. As a matter of fact, it never was true.

    Innovation comes about when groups of people, from divergent backgrounds,  come together to share and leverage their diverse experiences, disciplines, abilities and view points. This can only happen if you encourage networking within your organization. This happen only if it is done by design. And then supported and modeled by company leadership.

    Another key motivation for setting up networking initiatives, other than innovation,  is based on the simple fact that a business actually exists in the knowledge, relationships and minds of its employees. Distributing this knowledge is always a challenge, but replicating that information and knowledge through networking allows your business to weather losses of employees which inevitably occur. But leveraging a company’s collective knowledge, experience and relationship via either virtual or face-to-face networks  is vital to it ability to innovate.

    Additionally, there is a lot of value that can be obtained through sources external to the company. Harnessing this the power and potential of this new knowledge and experience demands a strong networking culture. And a strong networking culture must be supported from the top.

    You need to provide creative environments or events that encourage people to extend or develop their networks. People need to talk and discuss problems, issues, or ideas with people they have not yet met. These are events or situations where people regularly collaborate on new ideas.

    You need to provide formal events that cause people to interact with people they would not normally interact with. Later review who has made connections and allow these new acquaintances to work on projects together. This effort can pay off handsomely with big ideas. These type of events also allow the seeds of new networks to be planted. You then are allowed them to blossom with the informal networks events. Encouraging these types of activity and put programs into place that increases the number of networks and their size will help you insure innovation increases in your organization.

  • Agile Innovation

    How do you develop really good ideas? The answer to that is simply. Develop a lot of them. Most new ideas will fail. Only a few will succeed. How to you come up with really good ideas? Come up with a lot of ideas. Since it is recognized that most new ideas will fail you have to create an environment that allows for failure. Now saying you have allow for failure is easy. Living it is hard. But the fact is failure is not tolerated. And you are punished for failure. Stockholders will not accept failure.

    So how do you fail and end up with a success? Start by looking at the data. Since we know most new ideas will fail. First thing to do is generate a lot of ideas. The more ideas you generate the higher the probability you will generate one that will succeed. The chances of finding a successful idea is better when you are looking are 200 than if all you have to look at is 20. Once you have generated the ideas you have to evaluate them. I do not know any organization with unlimited budget undergo a full on evaluation  200 new ideas. every month.   You need a methodology to identify the good ideas and eliminate the bad ones. Fortunately, a methodology has been  developed, tested, and proven. The agile development used in software development.

    Software developers faced the problem of trying to deliver software projects on time, on budget and with the functionality promised. They almost always failed. It reached to point that no one ever believed estimates given by the developer. The developers would point out how the specifications for the project were different at the end then they were at the beginning. Generally there was a constant finger pointing war going on. Then agile projects were created. This is where the project was divided into very small deliveries and each delivery had to provide value to the customer. The project team provided small pieces to evaluate, test and use. Now the customer has a view inside the project and a chance to provide feedback and change course if needed.

    The same project can be used in developing innovation projects. Divide the development into small incremental deliveries. Most innovation project are high risk. You do not know it they will succeed or not. And most will not. So you want to terminate the work as soon as possible on this projects that do not show promise and reassign the resources  to those who do show potential or at least more potential. Using a methodology base on the agile model you get to evaluate early and often limiting the amount of resources spent on those ideas that will not work out.

  • Agile Software Development in Innovation

    A recent article in the Harvard Business Review How to Kill Innovation: Keep Asking Questions pointed out the natural result to the question “What about….” The idea dies. But if you don’t ask questions how do you know if a decision is correct of a idea should be pursued? Only companies or organizations that have a wealth of resources (like the government) can afford endless analysis to determine if a course should be taken or not. The agile software development model is a good one to pursue. The idea is do deliver early and often. What is delivered has some value to the project’s customer. The same can be done with an innovation idea. Break it down and determine what part can be developed and delivered to test the idea. Just as in the agile software model, small deliveries are made often. This provides the need basis for analysis and moves you down the path at the same time, saving time and money

  • Building Innovation – Part 2

    In a previous post Building Innovation Part 1I asserted that everyone at one time was creative and innovative and that creativity was actually unlearned. So what can you do to regain your creativity? What can you do to rebuild the creativity of those in your organization and thereby the creativity of your organization? Here are 6 processes you can implement.
    1. Develop a Learning Environment – Creativity is more easily achieved with a broad range of knowledge.  Learn as much as you can about as many things as you can. Ideas are like dots. Creativity is not a collection of dots. Creativity and innovation is creating new connection between the dots. Before you can make the connections you must first have the dots. As Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect.”  You get the dots by experiencing and learning many different things.

    2. Encourage Challenges to Conventional Wisdom and Assumptions – First the bad news, challenges to conventional wisdom will usually fail. Conventional wisdom became conventional wisdom because it usually works. But because it works does not mean it is the best way to achieve a result. Now the good news, when you find a piece of conventional wisdom that is incorrect you will be ahead or everyone else because they are still following conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom should be challenged to see if it still holds true.

    Ric Merrifield in his book, Re-Think, points out we should understand the “what” of a task rather than examining the “how.” This allows us to better understand the assumptions we are making about the tasks we are doing. He gives an example of sending a fax. What are you really doing? What you are doing is communicating status or confirming an order. Once you understand the “what” then you can question its value and optimize the “how” of what you are doing.

    3. Expect and Allow for Failure – Challenging conventional wisdom and established assumptions will often lead to failure so an organization needs to allow for failure if it is going to encouraged innovation. Dr. Robert Goddard, the father of modern space flight said, “Failures are valuable negative information.” Since the vast majority of your innovation projects will fail you need an organization that can run multiple projects at the same time. Then move the talent off of the failed projects to those that show promise.

    If the success rate is low then simple probability would state that the more innovation projects you start the greater the chance of having one that will be a winner. The odds of success of having 1 success out of 200 are much greater than having 1 success out of 10. So the question is how can you increase your chance of success without diluting your effort. The key is constant evaluation. If a project is not adding value to the organization or your customer then the project is terminated and resources are realigned.

    Once the ideas are gathered they need to be evaluated. In order to control costs you have to be able to make decisions quickly this means being able to make go/no go decision without a lot of bureaucracy. Organizations need a lean decision making process to identify and cut loose the looser and invest in those ideas that will bring value. Projects or ideas are terminated rather than jettisoned because the project may contain value data or information to solve tomorrow’s problem.

    4. Provide a Fun Playful Environment – There are two types of play. There is the playfulness that is simply practicing being creative. Then there is the type of play that is directed and has a purpose. The type of playing I am referring to is not the same as leisure. This is work. You are not going to golf course to relax and get some exercise. But it should be fun. The play needs to use your creative skills too, to allow you to re-learn the creativity you unlearned.

    When you are practicing playfulness you are not trying to solve a problem it is simply developing the skills needed to be creative. It may be doodling, composing music, sculpting with clay or Lego’s. Several years ago I saw how Cisco did a good job of this. In the lunch and break room they have a dish of Lego’s on every table. In order to develop and maintain highly creative engineers they encouraged their engineers to be playful and be creative all the time. They provided Lego’s for their engineers to play with during breaks and lunch.

    Playing with a purpose is playing with the tools and materials you use in your trade to solve problems. It allows experimentation of different materials and tools to solve a specific problem. It is like a programmer getting a new piece of software and asking what happens if I do this? It is not the same as reading the manual. What you may discover may not be contained in the manual. It is not the analytical experimentation. It is playful, and fun. But it is directed at solving a problem the organization needs solved.

    5. Encourage Innovation Teams – Innovation teams are teams of dissimilar individuals. You will remember creativity is combining ideas that have not been combined previously. Also remember one way to allow ideas to be combined is to challenge assumptions. Since it is difficult to recognize your own assumptions putting together innovation team of dissimilar people allows problems to be viewed from different points of view. The accountant, engineer, and sales person all have different interests and capabilities and therefore see the problem differently. None of these view points are necessarily wrong. They are just different. It is all the same problem just viewed from different vantage points. Having a team of dissimilar people all working on a project also allows input from different departments early on and thus problems later on in the process can be over come earlier or, an idea can be terminated early on because does not solve a key part of the problem.

    6. Evaluate for Value Added – We are all aware of projects made it all the way to the market place only to see them fail and either sink or nearly sink an organization. The organization violated a key principle. It forgot it is the customer that determines rather or not value has been added. It does not matters if all the company executives believe this is a great project or how novel the technology is. It is the market place that is the ultimate test. At every step along the way the customer needs to be consulted and if the idea is not providing value the idea needs to be changed or terminated

    Run cheap, quick tests to make sure you are on the right track. The first step could be running the idea back by a few customers to gauge their feedback. But don’t over think these tests. Get enough feedback to hone the idea and mitigate risk/exposure of taking it to the next step.