JD Stewart MD (magic dude)

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Law of Category

    I would like to thank everyone who joined in on the conversation on twitter and Facebook this past week regarding the Law of Leadership. If you would like to join in on the conversations I can be found on twitter at @jdstewart and of course I you can friend me on Facebook as well. The conversations centered around is there any sense in being the market if you are not the first mover or innovator. The short answer is yes but since it requires more than 140 characters to explain. That is the subject of this weeks cast.

    We learn the idea of being better early in life and it is continually re-enforced. Getting to the top by not doing something better but doing something new goes against so many core beliefs that is is difficult to except. We learn competition through sports. And the way you reach the championship is by being the best. So we try to reach the top by simply being better than everyone else. When we try to bring that understanding of competition to business and human nature it has limited success. We offer higher quality, faster deliver, greater variety, lower price. I mean, who would not want those things. But it is the first to market who grabs the mind share of the customer. That’s the law of leadership. But you can modify that law by defining a category or sector you are first in. You can gain a sizable market share by following the leader. And you can make a profit. There are companies who business plan is to always be a close follower. But if your goal is number 1 you need to innovate.

    All of this begs the question what is creativity Creativity is seeing old things in a new ways. It is putting things or ideas together in a way they had not be put together before. As Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun. But we can re-arrange the old things in new ways. That leads us to our next law. The law of Categories.

    The law of leadership is modified by the law of category or as some refer to is a the niche. Let’s start off by re-examining a question I asked last week. Do you know who was first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic ocean? Most people do. Charles Lindberg. And the second question is, do you know the name of the second person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean? You probably do not unless you listened to the last podcast. That person was Bert Hinkler. As you may remember Hinkler was a better pilot and navigator. He made the crossing in less time and used less fuel. But being better did not put him in the history books. No one knows who he is. Next question. Do you know who the third person was to fly across the Atlantic Ocean? I bet you do. But you don’t not them at the third person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. You know her as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart was still a first. She was first in a category she created. Being first in a category can be just as good as being first over all. You are still an original. This works well even if it is a made up category. For example Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Tito did not invent vodka. But prior to Titos there was no such category as handmade vodka. It simply did not exist! It was a made up category. They made it up simply to be number one in that category. Marketing genius! Any one who wants to compete with Titos in that category will be an also ran.

    Innovation is not simply creating a new product or service. It is creating a new way to look at that new product or service. When Apple came out with the iPod, it created great stir in the electronics community. Why? It was simply a mp3 player. Mp3 players had been around for a long time. Apple created a new category itunes. None of the technology was new. The technologies of e-commerce and downloading content had been around a long time. Apple was not first in any of those technologies. Apple created a new category. A category that provided secure, trusted, legal method to distribution music and other mp3 content. While today mp3 stores are all over the internet. No one has even comes close to what Apple is doing. Apple owns the mp3 player market because the created a category of mp3 distribution. Of course there are other laws at play here but those are for another time.

  • Use Best Practices if You Want to be Average

    There I was sitting in a boring meeting. My mind started to wander. I thought, “Who else in my industry goes to these types of meetings? Who else is doing what I do to try to build their business? No one!” My first reaction was, “Well since no one does it, it obviously is not a good use of my time either.” Then I remembered what I preach all the time. “The best you can hope for following best practices is being average.” I certainly have no desire to be average. In fact, I only want to only see average in my rear view mirror. That means I must do things others do not. That means I must try things that other think are risky. That means I must be willing to fail. Only by being willing to try the something different can I hope to be more than average. Have I failed in the past? You bet! Will I fail in the future? I hope so. Because it is only through failure that I can uncover something that is truly valuable to my family, my clients and myself. I then create new best practices and then improve on them. By continually recreating best practices I add value to my clients and stay ahead of my competition.

    If you want to be more than average avoid industry best practices and continually re-invent your own.

  • Experience is not a very good teacher.

    A cliche, that appears to be universally believed is, “Experience is the Best Teacher.” My father once told me he disagreed. He said, “Experience is not the best teacher. It may be a good teacher, but it is not the best teacher.” He then went on to explain that experience can extract an extremely high price. It is not only costly, it can inflict pain. And learning through experience is slow. Just think how long it would take you to learn something if experience is the only way you had to learn. Yes, experience can teach. And yes, you can learn. And the lessons you learn are not easily forgotten. But there are far better ways to learn than having to rely on experience. Learning from observation, listening, the experience of others are all much faster, less painful, and less costly methods of learning.

    All this is not to say you should not learn the lessons experience is teaching you. By all means, learn what experience has to teach you. But don’t rely on experience along. Utilized all the other methods of learning first. Experience is perhaps the most inefficient and dangerous method of learning.

  • 6 Tips For Starting an Innovation Program

    Innovation is hard. If it were easy everyone would do it. But why is it so hard. Managing innovation is what is difficult. Creating a culture that supports innovation is certainly difficult. Then nurturing an idea into a product or services that people love is hard. Innovation is hard because there are so many myths about innovation and consultants are selling snake oil.

    Innovation can be approached from several sides. It can be approached as a process, a strategy view, and an organizational structure or even as a toolkit. Each approach can be a little different.  What works for one organization may not work for another. Creating a culture that encourages and promotes innovation is easier said than done. Developing a culture within an organization that encourages innovation takes time and many organizations have the will but lack the time. Those organizations need to look externally for help. Bringing an organization together overnight in order to translate product and service initiatives into sustained results is tricky. But here are 5 quick tips:

    1. Challenging Assumptions.

    This is a very difficult thing to do. Why? Because we make so many assumptions and they are so ingrained in our psyche we do not even recognize them as assumptions. We believe them to be facts. Most of them are correct but a great many are incorrect. The problem is we do not know which ones are right and which ones are incorrect. If we knew which ones were incorrect we would change them immediately. So the first step to effectively challenging assumptions is to identify them. Start with the question, “What else would have to be true for this to be true.” More often then not you will discover that your idea is not a fact but an assumption and therefore something to be challenged. No good ideas will be seriously looked at without overcoming the assumptions that are held by an organization or industry. These exist in service industries such as banking, health care and hospitality as well as products industries such as, consumer electronics and personal care products. It is usually easier to start challenging your own assumptions by looking at industry level dogmas. Challenge everything!

    2. Involve the End User.
    The purpose for any business or organization is the customer. If an innovation fails eventually to provide value to the end customer then the innovation fails. Any organization that believes it can provide value to a customer without involving the customer in the process is deceiving itself. Most consumers are intelligent and can contribute much to the creative process. While it is true that often times people may not be able to verbalize their needs and desires in a manner that makes sense to you, your job is find creative ways to understand their needs, values and behaviors. The best and easiest way to figure figure out the customers needs is to involve them.

    3. Be willing to Take a Risk.
    At the executive level innovation requires guts. Not everyone is cut out for it. But without executive support the needed resources will never materialize. Businesses that are vibrant yesterday may not be vibrant tomorrow. So the executive must be courageous enough to take dollars away from yesterday’s businesses and give them to tomorrow’s businesses even though they are as yet untested. That takes guts. The majority of executive just are not capable of making innovation happen.

    4. Build an Innovation Team
    The innovation team needs to be made up of people from across different functions and business units. The team needs people not only with a range of skill sets and temperaments. In addition to the natural instinct to put people on the innovation team who are idea people i.e. those who are abstract thinkers, the team will need those who study the facts carefully, people who are strong organizers, and finally those who have strong people skills. Start with a small team and gradually expand to add more people.

    5. Innovation is a Business Process
    As with any business process innovation efforts should be managed. It cannot be done in a box. Develop metrics to tack the activities that make sense. I would warn against metrics that measure only results. Innovation is a process and as such you want to insure the process is active. The effectiveness of the process can be measured by the desired results. When you do get either a big or small win, ensure you communicate it across the organization. Innovation is a team sport. And every team needs it cheering fans.

    6. Utilize Techniques to Improve Success Rate

    It is not uncommon to hear people claim that innovation projects have a failure rate of about 98%. That is most likely because they are not approaching it in a systematically. Define a system that is sustainable with in your organization. Should involve problem identification and definition, and early communication. Utilizing techniques and tools such as open innovation and your success rate should be much higher. It is true that failure is part of any innovation process, but improving the chances of success is also part of an innovation strategy.

  • Misdirection

    One of the most useful and important tools in a magicians arsenal is misdirection.  Misdirection is generally misunderstood by the layman. Misdirection is not making you look at something while the magician is doing the sneaky stuff elsewhere. While that is the popular conception of misdirection it is woefully inadequate. Misdirection is letting you see what you anything you want to see. in fact you see so much that it is difficult to decide what is important. Because choosing what is important is difficult the magician “helps” you decide. Of course he directs you to what is interesting rather than important.

    Your customers, employees, and co-workers often will misdirect or confuse you. Unlike the magician their misdirection is usually not intended. The misdirection is the result of mistrust. They believe that if they are open and honest with you, you will cheat them. So they believes they must be cautious. The obvious solution is to build trust. But that occurs over time. So what do you do in the mean time? You can easily misjudge the importance of a thing. So how do you guard against misdirection?  How can you tell what is truly important rather than simply interesting? Waiting until the trick is over or the contract is signed is too late. Because what is thought to be unimportant it is not remembered. Why should it be? You thought it was unimportant.

    During a magic trick the magician moves relentlessly through the routine making your mind both process what just happened and at the same time trying to keep up with what is currently happening. All that information is difficult to process. Unlike a magic trick, we can stop an customer, employee or co-worker and test what we believe is important. This allows us to identify potential problem areas before they are agreed to

    The best tool I found for stopping the misdirection is to simply rephrasing what the person said, in your words, with your inflection, and your understanding. Then asking the simple question “Is that correct?”

    Try it I think you will find it works magic for you.