The Brainzooming Group

“Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” touches on eight perspectives and approaches to enhance innovation in you and your team. And on May 14, I’ll be presenting it at the Kansas City American Advertising Federation- KC (AAF KC) Get Charged Up symposium along with author Sally Hogshead who will be rocking the place with her afternoon session!

If you’re anywhere near the Kansas City area, and you’ve read or heard me talk up Sally since I met her 4 years ago, take advantage of this opportunity to see her live. In case you can’t make this Kansas City event, here are the 8 perspectives that can help you realize more innovation by personally being:

1. Introspective: Be more introspective and understand your creative strengths.
2. Diverse: Embrace diversity & build a creative team with complementary strengths.
3. Forgetful: Figure out how to selectively forget conventional wisdom to refresh your perspective.
4. A Borrower: Borrow thought starters & ideas from new sources & put your own twist on them!
5. Open to Possibilities: Open yourself to all kinds of possibilities by finding new ways to look at situations.
6. Inquisitive: Become more inquisitive and ask great questions to bring out new ideas within you and your team.
7. A Creator: Prioritize ideas and bring them to fruition – actually create something with your creativity.
8. Persistent: Be persistent & tenaciously pursue possibilities since “No’s” can provide insights to help you change & get to a “Yes.”   – Mike Brown

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It was a pleasure to do a segment Monday on High Velocity Radio with hosts Stone Payton and Lee Kantor talking about a variety of innovation topics. I met Stone initially via Twitter back in January, and appearing on Stone’s show was part of the prize for winning the IDEF140 contest he sponsored.

We covered a range of issues, so beyond a link to the radio show, here are links to many of the topics we discussed during our conversation.

• Slideshare link to “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” ebook
• Getting comfortable with sharing credit for innovation and the power of “we”
• Why it’s important to have diverse perspectives among an innovation group
• Why it’s helpful to be forgetful when it comes to innovation
• Ways to be more strategic on a personal level
• Making sure you’re able to prioritize ideas
• My creative instigation partner, Jan Harness, her Creative Instigation blog and our upcoming book
• Appearing at a Sydney, Australia innovation event as a result of Twitter
• Following me on Twitter: @Brainzooming
• My Most Memorable Business Mistake

Thanks again Stone and Lee for the opportunity to be on the show, and I look forward to being able to do it again in the future!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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At a Charlotte Business Marketing Association presentation on “Taking the NO Out of Business InNOvation,” a question was raised about the right number of people to have in facilitated innovation and strategy sessions.

• People with solid, front-line business experience to help frame business strategy issues.
• Others with functional knowledge applicable to the strategy or innovation topic to provide an understanding of capabilities.
• Creative instigators who can act as innovation catalysts by viewing business situations in new & unconventional ways.

Using The Brainzooming Group framework, we’ve done very successful multi-person strategic thinking sessions with two people who filled multiple roles. Often, it takes 3 to 8 people per group to have enough depth in each of the three areas.

Tomorrow’s post will highlight the business challenges of overloading an innovation session with too much creativity. Trust me, it doesn’t lead to the best, most implementable business ideas.  - Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I’m at the Charlotte, NC Business Marketing Association Lunch today speaking on “Taking the NO Out of Business InNOvation.” If you’re on Twitter, check out the hashtag #ncBMAlunch to see if we get some live tweets going!

Talking about the same topic at last Thursday’s KU class prompted a question on how to challenge ideas without being seen as a naysayer. Here are 3 tips to avoid getting labeled as negative:

1. Don’t Telegraph Your Comments

People often begin a challenge by clearly signaling through their body language (confrontational), tone (frustrated or agitated), or words (but, don’t, can’t, instead, etc.) they’re about to challenge something. Here’s an alternative – stop doing those things! Think hopefully about the conversation, looking for points of agreement; this will help modify your body language and tone. Then simply start building on the other person’s idea, even modifying it, without allowing your words and attitude to suggest you disagree.

2. Conceal Your Sources

People are also often very sincere in saying where an idea comes from, even when it really doesn’t matter. This happens frequently with new hires who trot out ideas prefaced by, “Here’s what we did at my old company.” The typical reaction? “If your old company is so great, why aren’t you still there?” In contrast, introduce a potentially challenging idea without any attribution, foregoing even claiming your own ideas. By allowing an idea to be introduced on its own, you can start getting consideration for it without any negative baggage its original source may create.

3. Give Your Ideas Away

What might be viewed as a challenging point of view from you may be seen as completely innocuous when coming from someone else in the group. The key here is to be comfortable with sharing an idea with a receptive party, letting them build and modify the idea, and then confidently in allowing them to introduce the idea if it means a higher likelihood of successful adoption.

Try these three, and you’ll be a lot less likely to be seen as giving NO for an answer.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Speaking and travel are both great sources of inspiration for blog topics. Twitter has become another one as well. This week, we’ll feature posts inspired through each of these sources.

Brainzooming – Being Perceived as a Strategic Leader

Last Thursday I spoke at Max Utsler’s Innovation in Marketing Communications class at Kansas University, debuting the new version of “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” summarized here a number of weeks ago. It seemed very appropriate since the first version of the presentation came from speaking to Max’s class 5 years ago!

One topic we discussed was the idea of very subtle ways to demonstrate a strategic perspective. This includes taking notes and recapping meetings to allow you to shape the conversation as it happens and afterward. One student voiced the concern that taking and typing notes can get you cast in an “administrative” role. It’s a valid concern, yet one that’s easily avoided. Here’s how:

• Don’t just take notes – take on a facilitation role. That means being ready to interject open-ended, probing questions to help the group explore the topic being discussed. Your active questioning and involvement provides equal footing with other participants even while you’re displaying the characteristics of servant leadership.
• Don’t just type up the notes – add value through summarization, structure, conclusions, and recommendations. When someone approaches note taking and follow-up as an administrative task, the report out is typically chronological, with the notes coming back word-for-word, space-for-space as they were recorded at the meeting. When approaching a recap strategically, however, it provides the opportunity to move beyond a chronological playback. Instead, you can group notes based on similar themes, organize them with a logic flow that a live meeting doesn’t allow, fill-in information gaps, form conclusions, and even begin to suggest recommendations.

Employ these two approaches and meeting participants will notice the difference. You won’t be mistaken as playing an administrative role. Trust me – I’ve seen it work time after time.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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To wrap the week, here are some quotes and notes from the marcus evans Customer Segmentation conference last week:

• “If you could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.” – American artist Edward Hopper from an airport billboard at arrival
• “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’” – Henry Ford from Sheryl Connelly’s consumer trend presentation

Several quotes from “Connecting What You Value to What You Do” presented by Kevin Clark, Brand & Value Experience at IBM:

• “FUMIFU – First Use Must Inspire Future Use TM” Polyvision Products, a Steelecase Company
• “You can tell you have good scenarios when they are both plausible and surprising; when they have the power to break old stereotypes; and when the makers assume ownership of them and put them to work. Scenario making is intensely participatory, or it fails.” – from Peter Schwartz’s book, “The Art of the Long View” , which both Kevin and Sheryl recommended
• “People forget what you say, forget what you did, but never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

That’s a wrap for the conference recap. It was great to meet everyone there and thanks to Ana Bardelas for producing a great event and making everybody attending feel very welcome!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Several marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference sessions addressed customizing experiences. Some highlights follow from two of them.

Edward Gala, VP of Corporate Marketing Services at Xerox, began his presentation covering a range of customization applications: personalized M&M’s, Heinz ketchup labels, and the recent “Obama losing by one vote” video. This emailed video effectively combines customization and viral elements to challenge the recipient to vote and avoid the result depicted: a news story reporting a one-vote Barack Obama loss traced to the video recipient’s failure to get to the polls.

Within the video, there are several appearances of the recipient’s name in newspapers, TV headlines, and even in a goat herder’s frightened reaction to a McCain win. It makes effective use of an experience memorability model that seeks to maximize personal interest (it’s forwarded by a friend, personal challenge to vote), experience intensity (surprising personalization, humor, anticipation), and a brand’s connection as the experience enabler (frequent references to Barack Obama).

This novel customization approach can trigger all kinds of ideas for applying it in other ways.

On the opening day, John Carroll, VP – Bottler Planning & Operations at Coca-Cola shared work they’re doing customizing and adapting retail store experiences:

• Coca-Cola segments to the store level, identifying each store’s “unique DNA.” To coordinate strategies with retailers, Coca-Cola maps its store segments to a retailer’s store segments.
• It’s also using shopping cart RFID to locate hot spots within a store based on movement patterns to isolate specific merchandising opportunities.
• Similar to a case study from Simon Property Group at the CMO Summit earlier this year, retailers are increasingly being considered as media outlets based on their audience delivery opportunities.

John also offered three great overall take aways relative to segmentation:

1. Don’t lose sight of your core business, even if you have to segment differently.
2. Use as many insights as possible in developing and refining your segmentation.
3. Make sure segmentation is simple, direct, and understandable.

This was a very content-rich event and tomorrow, we’ll wrap with some memorable quotes.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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