Steve Neiderhauser

The Imagination Economy

Last week, I received Ann Miller's newsletter. You gotta admire anyone today who is spreading a positive message, a message about taking control of your business and its future. Ann provided several examples of applied imagination that generated new business.

One customer succeeded by reversing her premise. Instead of selling Muncie as a solid, but second-tier convention site, she catapulted it into first place by calling it the un-Chicago site.

Ann also identified what I call the building blocks of creativity:

Substitute

Combine

Adapt

Maximize / Minimize

Put to another use

Eliminate

Reverse premise

Multiplication is another technique. How do you apply multiplication to product design? Intel did this when they created the Intel duo and quad core processor. Intel took one CPU and multiplied it to greater benefits.

When you read Applied Imagination, you'll see all the building blocks applied to creative solutions. You'll read and see how Walt Disney used multiplication: In a movie short he showed one violinist playing five violins at once, and then five violinists playing one violin.

When you tap into the creative source and are in the flow of the creative process, fears will be pushed aside and the window of opportunity will be opened wide.

So forget about the evening news and Katie Couric's baby blues. Turn your gaze to your gorgeous imagination — For the acts of your imagination is the only script you'll need to direct your movie of success.

In Pursuit of Elegance

In this blog post, Guy Kawasaki refers to an interview he did with Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance.

I haven't read his book, although after reading the interview here is my main thought: Much of what Matt talks about relates directly to screenwriting or story concepts. It's the gap, or the subtext in your product that creates curiosity and engages people in your product and your story.

In Dialogue techniques, the pull and power of implied dialogue is described. These story concepts — the ones that create subtext and engage your audience — can be applied directly to new product development.

Writing a screenplay or novel is one of the most challenging endeavors I can imagine. So if you are able to write or understand story concepts at an artistic level, you should be able to apply story concepts to products at the same artist level.

Let's look at one of the answers that Matt gave Guy in the interview.

How do you define elegance?

Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.

Subtraction is one of the building blocks of creativity. By subtracting the right elements you're able to engage the audience. We talked about this concept in Stories in Interviews — To keep the audience interested and curious... imply information, leave a gap so the audience is engaged in the story.

By the way, Matt's definition of elegance (unusually simple and surprisingly powerful) is Apple Computer's value proposition for its desktop computers. A supercomputer wrapped in an easy-to-use interface.

Blend Artistry with Engineering

In this interview stored on YouTube, Steve Jobs talks about the importance of having people on your team with a blend of artistic and engineering talent.

Part of what made the Macintosh great is that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists... who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Apple's latest version of GarageBand tells us the company is interested in nurturing new musicians. The software provides piano or guitar lessons, and makes online music lessons easy. Guitar lessons are taught by artists such as Sting, Colbie Caillat, and John Fogerty. I've taken a couple of the guitar lessons, and I can tell you it's much more enjoyable to learn music this way than through a chord book.

How does music amplify your talent? The basis of music is playing patterns and applying patterns in varying combinations. Also called — Creativity.

As you practice guitar or piano, you work with basic patterns (chords, for example) that you are constantly substituting, combining, or magnifying to produce new works of art. When we master the fundamentals of our imagination, we get a vision that our myopic friends are unable to see or dream of.

"Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals."
— Quote from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Anything can be Prototyped

The metacool blog describes how anything can be prototyped, and provides this sage advice:

A wise person operates with the worldview that anything can be prototyped, and we can prototype with anything.

If Steve McQueen can prototype his movie Le Mans, we can surely prototype services, customer experiences, and business models.

There are limitless benefits to prototypes, including the ability to expose the limits we have attached to ourselves, our products, and our customers.

How to Think Like Leonardo....

Di Caprio? Nope. I'm talking about Da Vinci, of course.

In How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb suggests that we follow Da Vinci's example and cultivate ambidexterity:

When Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, he astounded observers by switching his paintbrush from one hand to the other as he worked. Leonardo, a natural left-hander, cultivated this same ambidexterity and regularly switched hands when working on The Last Supper and other masterpieces. When I interviewed Professor Raymond Dart and asked him for his recommendations on the development of human potential, he responded, "Balance the body, balance the brain. The future lies with the ambidextrous human!"

In business, it's important to hire ambidextrous employees — people who have business and technology skills. For they can imagine the future. If you don't employ multi-talented professionals, you lose out on business oportunities that cannot be imagined by the linear worker.

Back to Leonardo. The artist not the actor. While reading Gelb's book I chanced upon the enchanting story of Leonardo's unfinished horse.

Leonardo was commissioned to build a 24-foot bronze horse by the Duke of Sforza. Alas, the Horse was not to be. After much work, Leonardo completed a clay model, and the Horse was ready for casting. France invaded Milan, however, and French archers used the clay horse for target practice, reducing it to a clump of clay. It's said that Leonardo never got over the destruction of the Horse.

After reading an article in National Geographic entitled "The Horse That Never Was," Charles Dent was inspired to start a foundation to finish the horse.

Ironically, Dent died when the Horse was in the same stage of production (model completed and acclaimed, but not yet cast) as when it was destroyed by the French archers.

Before he died, the foundation promised Dent that The Horse would be completed.

On September 10, 1999, 500 years from the day the original model was destroyed, the dream became reality. Il Cavallo — The Statue of Liberty for Creativity — was reborn in Milan as a tribute to the da Vincian love of truth and beauty.

When a renaissance man's dream gallops through the mist of time and takes center stage in Milan, you know that ambidextrous men and women hold power in their hands.

An American Horse was also cast.

Note: I wrote this post four years ago. Now, in a world where change and uncertainty are accelerating, the ability to see patterns and make your vision come true are more relevant and powerful than ever.

Stories in Interviews

Have you ever felt that potential employers really didn’t sit up and take notice of your skills? How do you stand out in a crowd of resumes? In a CIO.com article, career consultant Katharine Hansen tells us that story provides the answer.

Story-telling, when done right, reveals a job seeker's personality, makes him or her more memorable, and helps a job seeker establish an emotional connection with hiring managers.

The article goes on to provide a structure for creating your interview story. Although, I do want to point out that when telling your story you should never say directly that you are a great marketer or amazing software developer. Instead, that bit of wisdom is hidden in the story.

I know, it seems natural that we use the story to tell the interviewer, “I did this and I did that.” There’s a problem with this approach. She’s already heard this tale of talent a hundred times, and it bores her because she is not actively involved in the story.

Screenwriters are faced with this issue on many levels: Dialogue, providing information about characters, and the message of the story. To keep the audience interested and curious, screenwriters often imply information, leaving a gap so the audience is engaged in the story.

Instead of looking into the camera and saying, “I am very smart,” tell a story that implies your brilliance through the actions of the story. This method allows the interviewer to actively participate in your story, discover your message, and have the message stick with her.

Creating a compelling story does more than telegraph the fact that you have good communication skills. It implies that you have a certain level of design talent... that you understand how to apply design to words.

"Fifteen years ago companies competed on price. Today it's quality. Tomorrow, it's design. No doubt about it, tomorrow has arrived."
— Professor Robert Hayes, Harvard Business School

Here’s a final tip. When you finish the story, be silent. Why rattle on about your story. Let the listener absorb the hidden meaning. To see how the pros in Hollywood pitch a story, read this Blake Snyder post – Watch our words.

Intangible skills that drive success

James Brown pens an article about three intangible skills that make you successful. Sometimes you can follow all the rules and processes and still find a project on the brink of failure. Without the intangible skills you may find yourself overwhelmed by a project and working long hours, long hours that do nothing but drain your energy.

Let's focus on the third skill he discusses: Adaptation — The ability to respond positively to unfavorable decisions and unfortunate circumstances.

One way to improve your ability to adapt to circumstances is to develop personal skills or product features that are flexible and respond to change. Like a screenwriter who knows how to plant and pay off story plot points, you should anticipate what career seeds to plant so they pay off later when you need to respond to changing plots.