News SPLASH

Don’t mind the photo – it has nothing to do with this post except to place you in Hawaii which we serendipitously left less than 24 hours before the tsunami warning sirens started.

While there, on the island of Maui, we had our fill of delicious fresh fish: Ono, Ahi, Opakapaka, Mahimahi.  We ate so much fish in fact, that on our last day, we decided to have a burger.  The kids were thrilled. 

So, while Cool Cat Café got high marks from the locals, we knew we had to return to Cheeseburger in Paradise.  Maybe it was the restaurant’s beachside location in Lahaina that drew us there or the siren call of Jack Johnson and Dire Straits coming from the guitar player upstairs (or the fact that we first ate there on our honeymoon).

Or, since we are a family of entrepreneurs, perhaps it was the story.  The menu reminds us, “No Guts, No Story,” and this is a story we love.  In a nutshell:  Two restless Southern California girls explore paradise, eat expensive fish every day and one declares, “I sure would like a great big gooey, five napkin Cheeseburger.”  The first Cheeseburger restaurant opened in 1989 and today there are 8 locations.  The Lahaina restaurant serves 1,200 guests per day and 18,000 “cheeseburgers with an attitude” a month.

What’s your dream? 

For years, we’ve been known to share Splash M&Ms, aqua and blue candies that say “Make Waves” and “Splash!”   We even created some pink ones this year as a little treat to thank our Making Strides Against Breast Cancer/Splash for the Cure Team.   What’s not to love?  Delicious, affordable, fun!

The My M&M’s® line is now so popular, it has expanded to offer corporate and sports team logos, photos and more.  But as ubiquitous as these personalized candies are, at one time, just having little M's on candy was interesting.  So how did this innovation come to be?  Writer Jessie Scanlon explores this in a recent Businessweek article and provides lessons learned.  One of them is to forget focus groups.  Scanlon writes: “When it comes to new-to-the-world products or services, don't rely on what customers say they think or want.  As Henry Ford is quoted as saying, if he'd asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

It’s a new year and a new decade.  Share your pie-in-the-sky ideas.  Anything is possible.

Via today’s SmartBrief on Leadership, I saw an inspiring blog post, “50 Ways to Foster a Culture of Innovation,” by Mitch Ditkoff of Idea Champions.  Here are some of my favorite tips:

#4. Always question authority, especially the authority of your own longstanding beliefs.

#8. Help people broaden their perspective by creating diverse teams and rotating employees into new projects -- especially ones they are fascinated by.

#12. Instead of seeing creativity training as a way to pour knowledge into people's heads, see it as a way to grind new glasses for people so they can see the world in a different way.

#30. Stimulate interaction between segments of the company that traditionally don't connect or collaborate with each other.

#41. Don't make innovation the responsibility of a few. Make innovation the responsibility of each and every employee with performance goals for each and every functional area.

But don’t stop here.  Read all 50 tips and be inspired to move innovation to the top of your to-do list in the New Year.

Anyone else find Hallmark's line of hoops&yoyo™ cards hilarious?  If you aren't familiar with the line, there are two characters -- a pink kitty and a green bunny who offer spirited back and forth on a variety of subjects.  Listen to some of their banter here.  My first job out of college was with a division of American Greetings and there weren't too many variations on the traditional greeting card back then.  At that point, sending a HUUUGE card was a novelty (oops, did I date myself?).  The card world has come a long way with innovations like e-cards, voice recording and sound technology to keep customers coming.  And the marketing has come a long way too.  hoops&yoyo not only have their own web site but they have a blog.  Guess we'll see them on Twitter soon.

You may be surprised to learn that many artists approach creativity with the same discipline and focus you do.   No matter what the medium, art is a business.  This is an important distinction because often the responsibility for developing new products, processes or services is thrust upon a few “creative types” when, in fact, more stunning results come from making this part of everyone’s job description.

News Splash is starting a new series of interviews with people who make their living through the creative process.  We hope their stories will inspire you to step outside your comfort zone no matter where you register on the creative scale and channel a new spirit of innovation into your daily life.  Send suggestions on who you would like us to profile!

We saw this piece on comedian Chris Rock and innovation thanks to a terrific newsletter called:  SmartBrief on Leadership.  In the article "Innovate like Chris Rock," author Peter Sims says Rock's brilliance stems not only from talent but from his experimental nature.  To try out new material, Rock plays small clubs, testing his jokes there.  These "experiments" may succeed or fail based on audience feedback but, quickly, the winning lines are apparent.  The lesson for us?  Sims, co-author with Bill George, of True North (see our earlier posting), writes, "Experimental innovators don't overanalyze or put all of their hopes into one big bet - they quickly, creatively, and inexpensively use experiments to learn, gather insights, and identify unique opportunities - they then rapidly iterate, relearn, and refine to achieve success."   

As we tell our kids, the whole in stronger than one part.  In a recent article, reporter Janet Rae-Dupree reinforces that innovation requires a team of diverse minds.  She quotes Keith Sawyer, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who said:  "Innovation today isn't a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company," he said. "Just the opposite: Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it's built into the culture of successful companies."  One interesting tidbit, according to Ms. Rae-Dupree, is that brainstorming may be not be the most effective way to produce breakthrough ideas.  In fact, research shows that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups due to fear of failure (worry about criticism of an idea) or because workers want to leverage their best ideas to fit their own interests.  So, how do you get your teams to share knowledge?  Businessman and blogger Drew Boyd suggests that instead of starting with a problem and brainstorming to solve it, break down successful products and processes into separate components, then study those parts to find other potential uses.  This can lead to expanded innovation.  How do you generate ongoing innovation?