Send 10 Smiles and Win a Free Stamp!

Be one of the first to send 10 mini-tributes at www.isAbsolutelyRemarkable.com and win a free stamp from Creative Outlet Labs.  This self-inking rubber stamp will help you personalize your print correspondence and make them smile!  Just stamp and fill in your friend’s first and last name by hand. 

To earn a free stamp (actual stamp dimensions .75″ by 2.375″), send ten (10) mini-tributes from the same email address by January 31st, 2008 and you will be automatically entered in the contest.  I will select four entries and contact you via email for specific mailing details.  No purchase is necessary and the mini-tributes are free to send.  I can only accept entries from the United States from customers who are older than 18 years of age.

Observation the Key to Innovation

I have long contended that artists and comedians had extraordinary powers of observations.  My sister is a talented artist and she notices the smallest details, which of course lead to her unbelievably realistic artwork.  She notices how many petals are on a flower, what direction lies the fur on a dog’s back lies, or the hills just in the distance.  Those details easily lost on the more casual observer.

Some of my favorite comedians seem to have a similar knack.  In fact, Jerry Seinfeld made a whole TV series by observing the obsurdities of every day life. 

In Denis Hauptly’s Something Really New, he outlines three simple steps to creating truly innovative products, which pretty much center around thoughtful observation.  What tasks do people try to accomplish?  How can an innovative product, service, or combination of things streamline and remove steps from the task?  He points to lots of great examples, but all center around letting rich observation and behavioral research (like the ethnography studies that I have seen done at many companies) lead to new categories of product.  Only by observing a busy mother managing her day and using products, can you really empathize with her and design new products to make her life easier.

In planning for Remarkable, we are actively taking this approach.  How many steps are involved in the task as currently implemented?  Ask a lot of questions.  How can the creative application of technology make the task easier and faster by eliminating steps?  The final product will benefit from lots of observation (not to mention the fact that I am designing this product for myself, really see the need for it, and can’t wait to use it).  Actively and thoughtfully streamlining the workflow will help the product stay simple and relevant.

Employee Choices

Having managed teams and recruited employees, one thing has been reinforced time and time again:  People pick employers and make career decisions based on criteria generally unknown to employers.  The bigger the decisions, the more the criteria is unknown.  Offer an employee a relocation to a different part of the country, and then you will find out about the ailing health of their mother-in-law, their complicated custody agreements, or their involvement in a local soccer league.  In other words, there are reasons people work that have nothing to do with work.

Over the holidays, I read Ricardo Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend.  He have some very provocative ideas about a variety of business topics, but I really was interested in some of his ideas about human resources policies.  He emphasized the importance of personal choice.  He suggests what the employees’ neighbors and family get paid it more important than extensive job classification studies that HR professionals might rely on to set pay levels.  The diversity of individual preferences play out even more dramatically in other benefits areas, like health care, tuition reimbursement, variable pay/bonus programs. 

Makes me think what loyalty and motivation a company would inspire, if they offered compensation and benefits options.  One employee might choose to get every Friday off, in exchange for other perks.  Another employee needs more robust insurance, another wants to enroll in an MBA program and another wants a childcare credit.  One wants to invest their annual performance raise in a bonus program based on next year’s success.  Another wants a scholarship for their college-age child.  The options can be endless.

I remember an entrepreneur I know mentioning how her company offered on-site day care when her children were young and it became a big benefit to others that she employed at the time.  In other times in her business, those resources were put into other things that were more important to her employees at that time in her life.

If an employer found a way to offer a really flexible, menu-style total compensation program that allowed employees to cater their package each year to the needs of their families and lifestyles, imagine the loyalty that would be engendered.  After all, there isn’t another company that would give them the same package and an apples-to-apples comparison would be impossible.  Not to mention, the well-documented benefits of having happy, satisfied employees and its impact on customer service, productivity, and recruiting efforts in the community.

Creative Outlet Labs is probably a long ways from having a huge staff of regular employees, but when we do, I will think long and hard about offering non-traditional, highly-flexible compensation and benefits because a “one size fits you” approach (instead of a “one size fits all” approach) might be just the thing that gets a key employee through our door.

10 Laws of Simplicity and the Business of Undoing

I just finished John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity.  This MIT professor also keeps a blog on the same topic.  The ten laws are as follows:

• Reduce: the simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
• Organize: organization makes a system of many appear fewer
• Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity
• Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler
• Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other
• Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
• Emotion: More emotions are better than less
• Trust: In simplicity we trust
• Failure: Some things can never be made simple
• The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

I couldn’t help but draw a connection between John’s laws and the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which proposes that to create uncontested markets, one must purposely NOT do what the obvious competition does.  Features must be taken out.  Different elements must be emphasized.  Like the example in the book of contrasting Cirque de Soliel with traditional traveling circuses, one must decide what they are about and prune the rest (take out the animal acts and appeal to adults, instead of children, for instance).  If you have ever seen a Cirque show you can attest to the emotion, context, and differences that make all the difference.  They were able to dance around the elephants in their industry, so to speak, and deliver a whole new experience and create an amazing franchise.

This is a lesson for any new business, especially one finding a space in between other established players who are always seeking to do more, appeal to more customers, and create more noise.  To be successful, I firmly believe that one must thoughtfully and purposefully “undo” the competition by doing less, but doing it better. 

Simplicity will be the hallmark of Remarkable.  It will do something better, faster, and more satisfyingly (is that even a word?) than all the other alternatives.  Simple. 

Someone you know absolutely remarkable?

Don’t wait another second!  Tell them with a mini-tribute.

Creative Outlet Labs announced today the Absolutely Remarkable mini-tribute.  This new, free application allows you to create a custom, animated mini-tribute honoring someone and view it, send it yourself, or let us send it for you.  If you know someone who is absolutely remarkable, you must check out this fun site.

While you are at it, encourage your friend to sign up for the beta of Remarkable by Creative Outlet Labs.  If you like Absolutely Remarkable mini-tributes, you will love the full-blown application coming soon.  Sort of like a movie studio will issue a trailer to build excitement for their new film, we are doing the same, building excitement for Remarkable. 

Have fun using this and sharing it!

Software is Religious

I have been involved in many enterprise software or platform selection processes in my career and I can tell you that the discussions closely resemble religious debates.  At the risk of sounding disrespectful or irreverent, I have found that evangelicals on both sides of these software debates can find it difficult to see common ground and greater purpose.  I have joked that asking people to commit to a common CRM (customer relationship management) platform or the like is akin to forcing people to become Methodist when they were raised Lutheran (or insert any two religions here).  In the end, they must not just be software users.  They must be converts.

While true that people like expressing their own opinions and control over their working environment, that isn’t all that is at play here.  It goes deeper.  It is all about the users.  Getting people to agree on a software platform, is actually getting people to agree to a style of work, a tone of communication, and perhaps even a business strategy.  It is personal.

In consumer web applications, like we are building at Creative Outlet Labs, the choices of tools and process are even more personal.  We have to allow for a variation of user styles and outcomes, while staying true to the core value we are providing.  In short, we have to focus on the user first.  As the cartoonist and muse, Hugh MacLeod, says below “It’s not what the software does.  It’s what the user does.”

On the topic of platform selection, I ran across an interesting overview published by Smashing Magazine about some of the different software frameworks out there for web applications and why people feel so strongly for and against.  I found it readable, even for a non-technical person.

Wishing You a Good New Year

“Listen, here’s what I think. I think we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do. By what we deny ourselves. What we resist, and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include.” – From the movie Chocolat and brought to my attention from Management Craft

May you embrace, create, and include this year!

If you are looking for ways to do these three things, be sure to sign up for the beta of Remarkable by Creative Outlet Labs.

This fantastic (and somewhat unbelievable) photo by Allan White.