What George Carlin Taught Innovators—The Virtues of Vuja De
Posted by Bill - June 23rd, 2008Fans of edgy comedy—and critics of the political establishment—are mourning the death of George Carlin. Most of us know this game-changing comedian through his riff on the “seven words you can never say on television.” (Warning: This “Seven Dirty Words” clip on YouTube does indeed contain some pretty dirty words.)
But George Carlin made another contribution to the language—believe it or not, to the language of business and innovation. The term he coined was “vuja dé”—and it’s become a battle cry of sorts for innovators who aspire to make big change by identifying opportunities that others don’t see.
We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what’s valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those fresh eyes developing a new line of sight into the future.
Let’s face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn’t see?
Answering that question requires vuja dé. And vuja dé requires a radical shift in perspective—which is why outsiders often see the future first. It’s also one of the big limitations of benchmarking. The most creative CEOs I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when the best in class aren’t all that great. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.
I first heard the term from Tom Kelley of IDEO, in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation. Tom reports that he heard the term from Stanford Professor Bob Sutton, who explores it in his book, Weird Ideas that Work. And Bob reports that George Carlin was the original inventor. This blog post from Tom gives a pretty good history of the term.
And now you’ve heard it from me! (Actually, in psychological circles, the more formal term is jamais vu, defined as “a sense of eeriness and the observer’s impression of seeing a situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.”)
So the next time you feel stuck, like you’re cycling through the same tired thinking about the same old problems, figure out a way to look at things fresh—to apply the virtues of vuja dé. It just might unleash a new approach to innovation—and prevent you, in your frustration, from using one of the seven words you can can never say on TV!
Thanks for the laughs, George, and thanks for helping us see the world with fresh eyes.
Why the Celtics Won—Lessons from Auerbach to “Ubuntu”
Posted by Bill - June 21st, 2008Boston is bathed in green now that the Celtics have secured their 17th World Championship banner after a 22-year drought. I had the great fortune to attend Game 6 and cheer on this likeable team, as three spectacular performers (Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen) coalesced to do together what none of them had ever been able to do on their own—win an NBA title. It was a memorable night, filled with respect for the players and their coach, with nostalgia for the great teams and players in Celtics history, and with anticipation that this banner might be the first of several to be hoisted in Boston in the next few years.
It’s always fun to try to apply lessons from sports to the world of business—even though usually, as I’ve written in a previous post, the lessons are pretty limited. In this case, though, the re-emergence of the NBA’s most storied franchise can teach important lessons about leadership and teamwork—and teach us why, even as so much of the competitive environment changes all around us, the rules of success remain largely the same.
Indeed, what struck me most about Game 6 was how the success of the 2007-2008 Celtics blended leadership wisdom from the past with a cultural sensibility rooted in the present. Or, to put it more simply, how the unlikely combination of Red Auerbach and Archbishop Desmond Tutu inspired the team on its championship run.
The influence of Red Auerbach is obvious. I was choked up and literally choking towards the end of Game 6, as fans around me lit up cigars in tribute to the legendary coach, general manager, and president of the Boston Celtics—the man most responsible for those first 16 championship banners.
The best way to understand the genius of Red Auerbach, and to appreciate how relevant his ideas were to the current Celtics, is to re-read an interview he did with HBR back in 1987, shortly after the Celtics won their 16th title. My friend and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber conducted the interview, and it is filled with insights about how to create teamwork in an organization, how to evaluate performance in ways that go beyond statistics, and how one bozo at the top (in this case, John Y. Brown, who co-owned the Celtics briefly) could jeopardize in a year what it had took decades to build. “How do you motivate the players?” Alan asked, expecting, I imagine, a complicated, multi-faceted answer. “Pride, that’s all,” Red answered. “Pride of excellence. Pride of winning. I tell our guys, ‘Isn’t it nice to go around all summer and say that you’re a member of the greatest basketball team in the world.’”
No wonder so many fans at Game 6 wore T-shirts emblazoned with messages about “Celtics pride”—a mystique that Red Auerbach invented, and this team finally restored, not because they won this game, but because of how they played all year.
But there was a second legendary leader whose values hovered over the court during Game 6. At the beginning of the season, searching for a way to inspire three great players to sacrifice on behalf of team goals, coach “Doc” Rivers read a collection of speeches by South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At the center of the speeches was the concept of “ubuntu”—a term from the Bantu languages of southern Africa that’s hard to translate into English but boils down to a simple but rich idea: “I am because of you.”
As Tutu explained, “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished…”
The players took to the idea with real passion—they wore “ubuntu” on their wristbands, they chanted “ubuntu” as they broke the huddle, and, most important, they played selflessly, as if infused by the philosophy about which Archbishop Tutu spoke so eloquently.
Call it pride. Call it something more exotic. But it’s still what separates mediocre organizations from champions. And it’s why, the morning after Game 6, I ordered a different kind of T-shirt. It’s green, of course, featuring the Celtics shamrock, but it has only one word on it: Ubuntu.
A Publishing Strategy Worth Talking About
Posted by Bill - June 16th, 2008Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, is my kind of innovator. First of all, he hasn’t just started a high-profile, fast-growing company—he helped invent an entire field. To be sure, word-of-mouth marketing was around long before Dave and his colleagues started their agency in Boston. But BzzAgent’s success, and Dave’s personal thought leadership in the area, has taken the field to whole new levels of impact and professionalism.
Second, he is the kind of entrepreneur who insists on walking his talk—no matter how controversial the actions may be. Dave’s entire philosophy of business is about the virtues of transparency and the power of interaction. So, as I have written elsewhere, he and his colleagues have opened up the inner workings of BzzAgent, turning their corporate blog into a warts-and-all look at how BzzAgent really operates.
Well, in the spirit of walking the talk, Dave has done it again—and all of you get to benefit from his commitment to innovation! Like many idea-driven entrepreneurs, Dave decided to publish a book, in this case, a short, insatiably useful guide to the state-of-the-art in his field. The book is called The Word of Mouth Manual Volume II, and if you have any curiosity about how to get customers to start talking about your products and services, you simply must get a copy.
And that’s where the innovation comes in! Dave has persuaded a collection of bloggers who believe in what he is doing to write about the book and suggest that their readers check it out. We’re all doing it on the same day—today—and of course we’re free to say whatever we’d like. In return for our being part of this experiment, our readers—that’s you!—get to download Dave’s book for free.
That’s right: This book, which I guarantee will be of tremendous value as you think about the best way to raise the visibility of whatever you’re doing, is available to you at no cost. You can download it here. Of course, if you’re a traditionalist, you can also buy it from Amazon here.
I hope Dave’s publishing experiment works for him (and you) because it demonstrates some game-changing approaches to the new world of marketing. It starts, of course, with a terrific product—something worth talking about. It then leverages a strategy to get people talking—in this case offering a valuable book at no cost. And finally, that strategy relies on allies and enthusiasts to help carry the message—people who are prepared to talk about what Dave and his colleagues are doing because they believe that they are advancing a cause, not just peddling a product.
My advice? Download the book, talk about it inside your company, and ask how you can apply its ideas to get other people talking about your products.
Why We Went Zany for Zappos—And What It Says About Us
Posted by Bill - May 27th, 2008Every so often, writers click with their audience in ways they never expect—and learn something important in the process. I’ve had that experience over the last week or so, when a short item I posted here, and on my “Game Changer” blog for Harvard Business Online, spread across the media landscape like wildfire, generating all sorts of attention on the Internet, landing on a national radio program, even being featured in the pages of The New York Times and other major newspapers.
The post featured thoughts about Zappos, the fabulously successful online shoe retailer and the quit-now bonus it offers to new hires. When Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The company says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit! Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you don’t have the sense of commitment Zappos is looking for.
When I wrote about The Offer, I thought it was interesting because of how it applied to companies: Should more organizations pay their people to quit? But I’m convinced that my blog post generated so much attention because readers began to apply it to themselves: How big a “bribe” would I accept in order to stop doing what I am doing—and what does my answer say about how satisfied I am with my position and career?
As it turns out, that’s a question some high-powered business thinkers have asked as well. Jim Collins, one of the world’s most influential strategy gurus, began Good to Great, his record-shattering bestseller about corporate performance, with a story about what he did as he was finishing the manuscript. He went for a long run up a steep trail in Colorado, stopped to enjoy the view, when, he says, an “odd question” popped into his head: “How much would someone have to pay me not to publish Good to Great?” As the hypothetical price got higher and higher, and he still was prepared to publish the book, he finished his “interesting thought experiment” and came down from the trail convinced about his enthusiasm for the project.
So, in the spirit of the zany folks at Zappos, and the classic work of Jim Collins, perhaps it’s time to think seriously about how you would answer that question: How much money would it take for you to walk away from your company and your colleagues? Would your answer surprise your friends and family because the price is so high? (Meaning that you love what you do.) Or does the answer make you uncomfortable because the price is so low? (Meaning that your current job is selling you short.)
There’s no right answer, of course. But the answer may help you to figure out if your current job is truly right for you.
Yes, It Really is That Simple
Posted by Polly - May 24th, 2008Joe Nocera has a great piece on Southwest Airlines chairman Herb Kelleher’s final shareholders’ meeting in today’s New York Times. We’ve written here and in Mavericks about Southwest’s remarkable ability to set itself apart and define success—not just in an industry which is arguably one of the worst in history, but in the greater field of business itself. This week’s meeting, during which Kelleher handed over the chairman’s post to CEO Gary Kelly after 37 years, offers another object lesson in the iron-clad connection between engagement in the workplace and impact in the marketplace.
The contrast between the scene at the Southwest gathering and the American Airlines shareholders’ meeting, held just an hour earlier down the road in Dallas, is striking. While attendees of the AA meeting had to cross a picket line of angry members of the flight attendants’ and pilots’ unions (customers soured on the airline’s recent announcement of a $15 charge for checked baggage presumably hadn’t had time to organize yet), Southwest’s pilots not only joined other shareholders in giving the departing chairman a rousing standing ovation, they took out a full-page ad in USA Today celebrating Kelleher. It was, as Nocera puts it, “the love fest to end all love fests.”
That love (or “luv” in Southwest parlance) has long been a source of fascination and envy for analysts and competitors alike. And it is, according to Kelleher, the secret of the company’s success. He gave Nocera the same answer any of us who’ve traveled to Love Field to ask what makes Southwest tick have gotten: “You have to treat your employees like customers.” For Southwest, that means not only making an art and a science of hiring the right great people, but creating an environment where those people feel like valued members of the team, know that their ideas matter, understand that the big idea (in Southwest’s case “democratizing the skies”) drives every decision and trumps politics—and get in their bones that if you can’t enjoy yourself more often than not in the process, it’s not really winning. (It’s also worth noting that Southwest pays its people better than anyone else in the industry—while charging its customers the least and making the most money—and has never indulged in the widespread furloughs endemic to the business).
The rhetorical question at the heart of Nocera’s article is: Can it really be that simple? And while he reviews all the other standard arguments for the airline’s remarkable performance—from prescient fuel hedges to its efficient low-cost, low-fare, quick turnaround business model to timing—the answer is an emphatic yes. What’s more surprising than that answer is the fact that more leaders aren’t hip to it. I always feel a bit like a schoolmarm when I repeat this argument, but as long as the number of organizations that genuinely prioritize their people remains the inverse of the number of CEOs who declare “people are our most important asset,” I’ll happily shout it from the rooftops. Yes, people matter. Yes, you have to be as dedicated, inventive, and relentless when it comes to the human factor as any other aspect of your business. Yes, it’s the leader’s job to unleash the best contribution of every single person in the organization, not to crush and contain them with bureaucratic systems and byzantine policies.
I doubt I’d find a leader who would disagree on any of those points—I just wish I could find more who enthusiastically put them into practice. Maybe it would help to quantify the dollar value of this approach. Brad Bird, Pixar Animation’s two-time Oscar-winning director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, did just that in a recent interview in The McKinsey Quarterly (registration required):
In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Before I got the chance to make films myself, I worked on a number of badly run productions and learned how not to make a film. I saw directors systematically restricting people’s input and ignoring any effort to bring up problems. As a result, people didn’t feel invested in their work, and their productivity went down. As their productivity fell, the number of hours of overtime would increase, and the film became a money pit.
I don’t know how the math works out in other industries, but I do know that like Southwest, Pixar is an organization that grasps how simple (if not easy) it is to draw a straight line between creating an environment for people to flourish and flourishing in the marketplace.
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (Zimbabwe Edition)
Posted by Bill - May 21st, 2008We interrupt this business blog to reflect for a moment on man’s inhumanity to man. I’d never make light of the economic, political, and human-rights meltdowns in Zimbabwe, a beautiful country ruled by one of the truly horrible human beings in the world. But sometimes a situation gets so tragic, so insanely awful, that you have to laugh a little to avoid crying.
Earlier today, the Associated Press reported that inflation in Zimbabwe is now running at an annual rate of one million percent. You read that right: One million percent! A loaf of bread, the AP says, now costs what twelve new cars cost ten years ago. How does one begin to comprehend one-million-percent inflation? Nick Carr, writing in his Rough Type technology blog, offers a few head-spinning glimpses of the situation. Item number one: The government has just added a half-billion-dollar note to the currency. A half-billion-dollar bill!
He also points to the Daily Speculations economics blog, whose author tells the following story about a friend of his who had lunch in the country: “During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer—bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers). He ordered a 5th one, was advised that the price, which when he ordered his 1st, 2nd 3rd and 4th ones, was 160 million per bottle, had gone up to 340 million per bottle.” You read that right too: The price of a bottle of beer more than doubled–during lunch! And the price started at 160 million Zimbabwe dollars per bottle.
I don’t know what to make of any of this, other than the world never loses its capacity to depress and amaze—and people, despite the most unthinkable conditions, somehow endure. So the next time you’re at lunch complaining to a colleague about how tough your business is, or how rotten the economy is, think of the people trying to make a go of it in Zimbabwe—and raise a beer to their struggles to stop this insanity.
Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too
Posted by Bill - May 19th, 2008I spend a lot of time visiting with companies and figuring out what ideas they represent and what lessons we can learn from them. I usually leave these visits underwhelmed. There are plenty of companies with a hot product, a hip style, or a fast-rising stock price that are, essentially, one-trick ponies—they deliver great short-term results, but they don’t stand for anything big or important for the long-term.
Every so often, though, I spend time with a company that is so original in its strategy, so determined in its execution, and so transparent in its thinking, that it makes my head spin. Zappos is one of those companies. Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to Zappos headquarters in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas, and spent time with CEO Tony Hsieh and his colleagues. I could write a whole series of posts (and just might) about what I learned from this incredible operation. But I want to focus this post on one small practice that offers big lessons for leaders who are serious about changing the game in their field—and filling their organization with people who are just as committed as they are.
First, some background. As most of you know, Zappos sells shoes—lots of them—over the Internet. The company expects to generate sales of more than $1 billion this year, up from just $70 million five years ago. Part of the reason for Zappos’s meteoric success is that it got the economics and operations right. It offers customers a huge selection—four million pairs of shoes (and other items, such as handbags and apparel) in a warehouse in Kentucky next to a UPS hub. (If Imelda Marcos weren’t already dead, she’d visit that warehouse and have a coronary on the spot.) It also offers free delivery and free returns—if you don’t like the shoes, you box them up and send them back to Zappos for no charge.
So the value proposition is a winner. But it’s the emotional connection that seals the deal. This company is fanatical about great service—not just satisfying customers, but amazing them. The company promises free, four-day delivery. That’s pretty good. But most of the time it delivers next-day service, a surprise that leaves a lasting impression on customers: “You said four days, but I got them the next morning.”
Zappos has also mastered the art of telephone service—a black hole for most Internet retailers. Zappos publishes its 1-800 number on every singe page of the site—and its smart and entertaining call-center employees are free to do whatever it takes to make you happy. There are no scripts, no time limits on calls, no robotic behavior, and plenty of legendary stories about Zappos and its customers.
This is a company that’s bursting with personality, to the point where a huge number of its 1,600 employees are power users of Twitter so that their friends, colleagues, and customers no what they’re up to at any moment in time. But here’s what’s really interesting. It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)
Indeed, CEO Tony Hsieh and his colleagues keep raising the size of the quit-now bonus. It started at $100, went to $500, and may well go higher than $1,000 as the company gets bigger (and it becomes even more difficult to maintain the all-important culture and obsession with customers.)
It’s a small practice with big implications: Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people. How are you making sure that you’re filling your organization with the right people? And how much are you willing to pay to find out?
The Death and Life of a Creative Genius
Posted by Polly - May 15th, 2008Yesterday’s papers were full of obituaries and essays exalting the life and work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, who died on Monday. Rauschenberg has been called pioneering, prolific, protean—and is universally considered one of the art world’s most important innovators. It’s his resonance beyond the art world—and his relevance to anyone who aspires to bountiful, joyful, sustainable success in his or her work—that I’d like to pay my respects to here. In addition to leaving behind a monumental body of work (the Guggenheim mounted its largest exhibition ever with 400 works for his 1998 retrospective), Rauschenberg’s approach to that work offers up some profound lessons for innovators and artists of all stripes. Here are just three:
Boundarylessness
That may not be a word, but Rauschenberg was a virtuoso practitioner. Rauschenberg wasn’t locked in by the categories that constrain so many of us—career, profession, industry, medium. Instead, he imagined for himself a playing field with no boundaries. He was at once a painter, sculptor, photographer, printmaker, theater designer, choreographer, performer, and engineer—and his work in each realm pushed at the established borders.
He is probably most famous for his “Combines”—the act and result of finding and combining an array of elements. His “Monogram” (1959) combined a stuffed angora goat, a police barrier, a shoe heel, a tennis ball, and paint. But perhaps his greatest boundary-crossing feat (and his greatest gift to the world) was to, as he put it “work in the gap between art and life.” Famed art critic Robert Hughes puts it better than I could. He calls Rauschenberg “a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art. [He] didn’t give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman.”
That approach to work certainly won Rauschenberg acclaim and financial reward (he’s the only artist to win both the grand prize at the Venice Biennale and a Grammy—for his album design of the Talking Heads’ “Speaking in Tongues”), but it also afforded him the ultimate richness: to be truly awake in the world. As he put it, late in his life: “I’m curious. It’s very rewarding. I’m still discovering things every day.”
Fearless Experimentation
It’s no secret that experimentation (and the failure that goes along with it) is at the core of innovation. While we’ve all probably absorbed the maxims—”fail faster to succeed sooner” or “let 1000 flowers bloom”—few of us have cultivated the insatiable appetite for experimentation that Rauschenberg considered his true work (the art itself, he said, was more like “souvenirs of creation”). Dig a little bit into his story and it’s hard not to be infected and inspired by his adventurous avidity for trying new things—from kinetic sculptures to composing (he was both artistic director of Merce Cunningham’s dance company for years and a collaborator with John Cage).
But it seems Rauschenberg wasn’t just fueled by some inner light—he was propelled by diverse and deep collaborations with everyone from stage performers to engineers. At one point, he founded a collective called E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) to match up artists, scientists and engineers. Most of all, he had the ability to look upon mistakes and failures as a gift: “Screwing up is a virtue,” he said. “Being correct is never the point. . . Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.” And that’s a lesson for all of us: productivity and genuine good-humor toward our inevitable stumbles, rather than a particular talent, puts us on the path toward success (and may in fact be the definition of success itself).
Generosity of Spirit
We tend to think of great artists as obsessive, in the grips of a vision that separates them from the world. Rauschenberg, on the other hand seemed to see a world outside his art—or his art as a way of connecting with and changing the world. Not only was he quite generous when it came to spreading his wealth around, his work was increasingly about spreading the rewards of art around. He funded a major exhibition of his works in China (the first show by and American artist there) and conceived of a world tour called ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) in which he traveled around the world, created collaborative works with people in places like Tibet and Cuba, and exchanged art from one culture to the next.
While few of us will walk out of this life with a body of work like Rauschenberg’s to represent us, we all can aspire to follow the principles he practiced.
NAU: Ahead of its time?
Posted by Polly - May 2nd, 2008I’ve written about Portland, OR-based outdoor clothing retailer Nau and its compelling brand of “business activism” here before. Today, I’m sad to report that Nau is closing shop. I spoke with Ian Yolles of Nau today and he confirmed that they were unable to close their latest round of funding, and after exploring every option, are left with this crushing decision—it turns out there’s not much room in today’s retrenching capital markets for the soaring ambitions of a company like Nau.
A word about those ambitions before we start picking apart the business model and intoning knowledgeably about why it failed.
From the start I found Nau’s plan almost breathtakingly ambitious—but unimpeachably right-minded. The founding idea at the heart of the company was that business has a responsibility (and a great opportunity) to contribute to positive and lasting change in society and the environment. Nau’s founders were so serious about this, they took the unprecedented move of writing a triple bottom line into the corporate charter. From the start, Nau wasn’t simply interested in producing killer product (although they accomplished that by pushing the boundaries on sustainability, performance, and style further than anyone has before in the outdoor industry—when do Vogue and Rock & Ice ever rave about the same product?), they were also intent on disrupting the economics of their industry, changing the way people shop (in futuristic “webfronts” that I believe contain powerful signals of what’s next in retail), and inspiring a wider movement among businesspeople and consumers.
As CEO Chris Van Dyke put it to me in his laid-back and guileless way, “Why would anyone start a company for any other reason?”
I think that’s even more true today than when Nau’s band of founders were first hashing out those ideas over coffee at the Urban Grind in Portland a few short years ago. We’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: great companies don’t just offer great products or great services, they stand for important ideas. Ideas with the power to fundamentally reshape the sense of what’s possible among customers, employees, and the wider world. Having a meaningful idea agenda doesn’t guarantee you’ll win (as the events of today demonstrate), but not having one is a sure path to failure.
As Alex Steffan points out in his elegant elegy on Worldchanging (channeling Aristotle), there are many ways to fail, and Nau has failed in the best possible way. How? Because they’ve left a legacy of important ideas—ideas that represent a gathering force in the world and continue to animate a wider community (the “collective” Nau saw as its audience rather than any consumer demographic). And because they’ve modeled a different way to be a company: one in which the first order of business is for every person to be remarkably thoughtful about what it means to be good and to do good at work and in the world—and to be equally meticulous about matching their every behavior to those beliefs.
I could go on (and I have, as anyone who’s caught me in a Nau item and asked, “Where’d you get that?” knows all too well). But I’ll let the folks at Nau have the last word. Here they are thinking big and thinking right even in the toughest moment:
Nau set out to show the world that business can be a force for positive social and environmental change. Although our current financial obstacles have proven to be insurmountable, it does not mean the ideas associated with Nau are unattainable. Nau was merely one attempt to express a larger idea that was around before us and will survive long after. It remains as urgent as ever for businesses to take the lead in creating a sustainable future for humans and the planet. We, as individuals and as members of a grander collective of the change-minded, look forward to continuing that journey.
P.S. Check out the site ASAP for incredible bargains on the remaining inventory.
Talent Trumps Resume, Persistence Trumps Talent
Posted by Polly - April 30th, 2008In putting together an ongoing series on the “New Rules of Success” for my CNN gig (”new” being a loose term to describe what happens when a new generation stumbles upon eternal truths—or when the times catch up to those timeless truths), I’ve encountered two seemingly contradictory pieces of wisdom about talent that add up to a powerful lesson about sustainable success.
The first comes from Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer of Threadless—a remarkable platform not just for selling t-shirts on the Web, but for providing individuals from all over the world an outlet, rewards, and recognition for their talent. Bill’s written about their powerful approach to customer community and their powerhouse business model here. Here’s how it works: the site receives some 800 usable t-shirt designs from a worldwide pool of customers, amateurs, and designers around the world every week. Those get scored by some portion of the site’s 725,000 registered users and then about a dozen get chosen for sale every week. The winning designers get $2000 in cash and $500 in gift certificates.
In its few years in existence, Threadless has minted many mini-celebrities and design darlings (one of whom, Glenn Jones, just left his day job to set up his own t-shirt emporium). But the point isn’t to celebrate stars so much as to keep the playing field level, says Kalmikoff. He reports receiving submissions from “a world famous design superstar” and “a 15-year-old kid from Japan” in the same week. The design diva’s submission didn’t even make it to the scoring phase, while the kid’s design rose to the top. In other words, Threadless’ founders have designed a t-shirt talent-ocracy, where “it doesn’t matter what’s on your resume—it’s how relevant your art is to the moment you submit it,” says Kalmikoff. Talent trumps resume. (What’s more, the focus on talent-above-all isn’t just a management mantra. The top Threadless designers routinely shake off their celebrity to post under new aliases, just to make sure they’re still getting by on their merits and not their reputation.)
But wait a minute, isn’t this notion that “talent is the ultimate currency” responsible for spawning a generation of twenty-somethings who show up at work thinking they can do anything (and deserve everything) on Day One? This is the crowd (along with their doting and anxious parents) my friend Dan Pink addresses in his lively new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need (and the first career guide to serve up profound wisdom in cartoon thought bubbles, or Japanese manga form).
Among the six spot-on lessons about the nature of success and career Dan highlights via the adventures of a hot-chick genie type and a Keanu Reeves-esque young office drone (and yes, there are pictures!), is one that seems to contradict the primacy of talent. Instead, says Dan: Persistence trumps talent. It’s an old-fashioned lesson whose time has come (again). “There are massive returns to doggedness,” Dan writes. “The people who achieve the most are often the ones who stick with it when others don’t. . . They show up. They practice and practice and practice some more. . .” (Or, as the Post-It attached to my computer monitor lo these many years has been reminding me, in the inimitable words of Dorothy Parker, “Writing is the art of applying ass to seat.”) “The world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist, who didn’t put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone.”
So which is true? Talent trumps resume or persistence trumps talent? Luckily, we won’t have to host an aphorism smack-down, because it turns out, both are true. In fact, it all ties up rather nicely. There’s a certain paradoxical psychology behind the pursuit of success: if you’re pursuing success for its own sake (for the reward, the promotion, the fame), you’re less likely to succeed than if you’re pursuing something deeper, following a genuine passion, doing something you like (or even love). As Dan puts it, “the more intrinsic motivation you have, the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.” You can see this principle in operation at Threadless. The best designers on the site aren’t looking for fame or acclaim so much as a chance to exercise their talents and mix it up with like-minded peers—and the community is set up to give them endless opportunity to do so. The level playing field allows for talent to come from the most unlikely places—the winners are most likely to come from a place of persistently and enthusiastically practicing their craft.
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