Steve Neiderhauser

Serious Play

The trend toward modeling software is helping to fix the requirements mess.

If you're interested in learning how to use models and prototypes and demos to jump start innovation, you may want to attend iRise's webcast on December 8 -- Innovation: The Next Great Frontier. There's an added bonus. If you watch the entire webcast you'll get a free copy of Michael Schrage's Serious Play.

And if you want to get scary serious, use a storyboard to model your demo.

Applied Imagination

Have you ever felt drained of creative ideas?

The next time the creative well dries up, drink from the fountain of ideas that spring from Applied Imagination, by Alex Osborn. Here are some of the concepts that will prime your well -- adaption, substitution, rearrangement, reversal, combination, multiplication.

Walt Disney knew how to multiply:

In Disney's movie-short of an orchestra playing William Tell he showed one violinist playing five violins at once, and then five violinists playing one violin.

Storyboards for creative cats

For those interested in storyboards, you may want to study the storyboard techniques that Blake Snyder writes about in Save the Cat!

Materials:

• Corkboard
• Index cards
• Push pins

High-level Process:

• Break story into scenes
• Encode scene onto an index card (include conflict and emotional change)
• Divide corkboard into three acts
• Pin the index cards to the board under the appropriate act
• Model your story by playing with the index cards

As you analyze this technique, you’ll recognize the fundamentals of creativity -- Break the material you’re working with into its basic elements; store the elements in your subconscious.

Your creative unconscious will start to use magnification, combination, reversal... and the other acts of imagination to deliver a work of art.

Compiler Platform

Don't be surprised if you see a flock of compiler tools flying out of Redmond and Cupertino over the next year. Microsoft and Apple are incorporating the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure into their development tools.

Chris Lattner, the primary author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, now works at Apple, driving LLVM technology into Apple products. And Microsoft's Phoenix Project also uses building blocks to create a compiler platform.

A Tale of two presentations

From clouds to clutter, Garr Reynolds analyzes, compares and contrasts the stage acts of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Save the Cat

According to Guy Kawasaki, the only thing worse than a paranoid entrepreneur is a paranoid entrepreneur who talks to his dog.

It’s rather ironic, then, that we’d get sound business advice from a book titled “Save The Cat!” Blake Snyder, the author, gives the same advice as Mr. Kawasaki. Freely share -- and test -- your ideas.

Blake is talking about screenwriting. Compared to business, screenwriting throws up fewer barriers to entry. I mean, if someone wants to steal your idea and write a story, all she needs is a laptop and a Starbucks card.

But wait, there’s a catch. The success of a story depends upon its structure. And structure can only be produced by a craftsman who understands story. So there’s little reason to be afraid of sharing your ideas.

How do you share your story idea?

Create a logline. A logline tells what the story is about in one quick line. Here’s an example:

A just-hired employee goes on a company weekend and soon discovers someone is trying to kill him -- The Retreat

Blake goes on to explain the four keys to an effective logline.

By the way, “Save the Cat” is a phrase that Blake coined to represent one of his screenwriting rules. He calls it the “Save the Cat” scene:

They don’t put it into movies anymore. And it’s basic. It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something -- like saving a cat -- that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.

Creative Thinking

While browsing a magazine at Barnes & Noble I chanced upon this article.

The gist of the article?

How you think determines what you create in art -- and in business.

Platform Play

In August, Cocoa Radio interviewed Brent Simmons about NetNewsWire, an RSS reader. NetNewsWire is built upon Apple's Cocoa framework and an application framework that Brent developed. Together, these frameworks act as a product platform.

Note: Language frameworks include .NET, Java, and Cocoa. The application framework consists of software components specific to the product. A building block that calculates the present value of a cash flow stream, for example, may be in the application framework for a finance product.

Several weeks after the interview, NewsGator acquired NetNewsWire. Marketing Playbook identified the acquisition as part of a Platform Play.

In the software industry, a relationship exists between product platforms and platform plays. If you develop an easy-to-use product platform, it will be easier for you -- and your customers -- to move to the platform play. Typically, you will start out in another marketing play, gain dominance, and find yourself in a position to run the platform play.

What's more, a product platform is a launch pad for the rocket of proof. John Zagula and Richard Tong teach us that proof is more powerful than benefits or features. If that's true, shouldn't we be dreaming of ways to showcase proof?

Consider this scenario:

You start a software consulting business. You are one of hundreds promising to deliver software. But what if you create a product platform and produce customized demos for each client?

Because product platforms feed into the proof equation, you can now speed past the competition. You'd think that most software consulting firms would take this approach, but they don't. And many that do, create a mess of the product platform.

The Marketing Playbook points out that when you move to the platform play, the platform has to be easy for customers to use. NTT DoCoMo is one example:

"They started by using a simple subset of common HTML so that it would be exceptionally simple for anyone to create a site or service."

And when customers find they benefit by joining your platform, they will defend you from competition. So even though you may be unable to run a platform play from the start, start thinking about how to run a platform play in the future.

The world is flat -- your company should be flatter

There I was, listening to a management guru talk about project management when he started jabbering about The World is Flat. He enunciated very clearly about outsourcing for several minutes; greeted by yawns he moved to another topic. Unfortunately this fellow had only a surface understanding of high performance teams and organizational theory.

To go deeper, all he had to do was read the book. What book you ask. Any org theory book from the past 20 years.

You see, organic isn’t just for farmers. Companies have also been admonished to use the organic model -- characterized by free flowing information and flat structures.

Isn’t it ironic, then, that we could of had a flat world 20 years ago simply by aligning our organizations with the reality of the information age. And this internal flat world runs circles around the external flat world.

Instead, like one of Dr. Phil’s troubled patients, we shop for spangled outsourcing so we feel good for the moment, when we should have been developing internal abilities so we’re prepared for the future.

Make your ideas pretty

"Make ideas pretty" is Martha Stewart's mantra.

This week's apprentice TV show dramatized the benefits of this chant. The project? Create a marketing brand for a new laundry product. One group's effort was a disaster. Their idea of visualizing an idea consisted of running about the stage and making loud noises.

The other team created a skit (a story) with one character dressed as Superman (a metaphor). Superman punched out a character dressed as a stain -- the audience loved the performance. And so did Martha.