“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is there any more familiar quotation related to innovation?  I doubt it.  However, “build a better mousetrap” was actually a misquotation. What Emerson really said was…

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

So there you have it.  The original quotation wasn’t about innovation at all.  It was about quality.

The thing that strikes me most about this quote is the last bit about “though it be in the woods”.  I think the implication here is clear.  You may not be a marketing genius or have the best location but if you build quality products that people need and want and you can get people sharing their experiences with your product, you’ve got yourself a winner.

Unfortunately building a product that users NEED and WANT turns out to be a massive challenge.  Many fabulous examples of innovative products that lacked  a “broad hard-beaten road” (to name just a few) are … Google Wave, Apple Newton, and don’t forget the undeniably innovative Segway, but there are many many more.  What goes wrong?  Why does such innovative and useful products go unloved and underused?  Easy, they are revolutionary instead of evolutionary.

I know what you’re thinking… “Revolutionary products are great.  They take us into previously undiscovered areas. They advance mankind.  Yada, yada, yada”.   And that is certainly true but in the context of users, revolutionary change is hard.  To successfully introduce revolutionary products means you have to educate, educate, educate, and one more thing… educate.  For startups this is especially difficult.  Not only do they have to contend with the building a company and product but they also have to spend considerable capital to educate their potential users on the benefits of a product that user’s may not even know they need.  Ouch!

I submit that it is often better to follow an evolutionary path to customer discovery than to jump on the innovation bandwagon with a revolutionary product that consumers have to make a giant mental leap to understand.  Startups should focus on finding the unmet needs of their targeted segment and then simplify, simplify, simplify.  The three S’s.

1)  Simplify customer acquisition

Customer acquisition refers to how easy it is for a customer to get started with your product.  Obviously free products have a very low hurdle to getting started.  Contrasted with the Segway’s price tag of $5000.  Getting people invested quickly and easily is the key to future growth and success.

2)  Simplify usability

We’ve all heard this one before but the art of usability is just that… an art.  Some people have the knack for creating user experiences that work consistently (Apple) and some don’t (Microsoft).  Making sure your users are never confused is a major accomplishment and one that should be worked extremely hard on.

3)  Simplify messaging

Stop talking about the features of your product!  Nobody cares!  What users care about are themselves.  They want solutions to their problems, not features in your product.  Your messaging and positioning should reflect that.

I may be way off base here but I don’t think so.  I’d love to hear your ideas for successfully introducing revolutionary products and overcoming the education hurdle on a shoestring.

My Twitter relationships may lack the depth of trust that I have in the “Friend” model (in some cases of Facebook, LinkedIn, or email but they’re still relationships that I’ve come to value and that provide me with a sense of community.

How this happened surprised me.  I had sporadically used Twitter for about a year, but wasn’t finding it very useful until I started using the search feature of Twitter to discover people that I shared a common interest with.  I’ve talked about this in the past, but in a nutshell to get an action (or Twitter usage, in my case) requires the following…

• Find people that share a common interest, motivation, or problem.  This commonality is the building blocks of relationships (aka community).
• When relationships form around a shared interest excitement is generated from the freshness of new ideas and finding people that share your passion.
• Excited users are users that take action, and in my case that was Twitter usage.

In essence by discovering people that shared my common interest for open source, community, and collaboration I discovered pockets of  users that shared my passion, and by ‘Following’ these people and interacting with them I developed new relationships that drove my adoption and usage of Twitter.

It then dawned on me that Twitter wasn’t about micro-communication it was about Macro-Community and bringing people together around the things that matter most to them, in essence, a ginormous community organizer.

I must admit, I’m excited at the opportunity for Community that Twitter has created.

More Reading

Community Building Success Factors
Finding the Value in Twitter

Nearly 35 years ago Fred Brooks wrote his seminal book Mythical Man Month detailing his experiences managing a large team of developers.  He observed that adding resources to a project could actually impede progress due to communication overhead between increasing numbers of project members.  Everyone needed to keep apprised of what everyone elese was doing.  This communication overhead actually slowed progress.

Brooks looked specifically at software development projects, but I believe his conclusion holds true across all projects.  With the proliferation of matrix style organizations and the lack of strategically focused planning, we’ve created a corporate culture that reacts to every crisis by sending lots of email and having lots of meetings in the hope that something positive must happen due to all this communication.  The secret is, it won’t.  Lots of communication only exacerbates the problem.  What we need to do is remember that communication does not solve business problems; strategic planning and productive action solves problems.

The Quest for the Empty INBOX

This is the time of year we think about our jobs and how our actions map to our company’s goals.  It’s objection setting time.  Year after year we define meaningful, seemingly attainable goals only to see them gradually slip away during the course of the year due primarily to one thing, too much unfocused and unproductive communication.  As crazy as that sounds, how many times have you went to work full of enthusiasm for finally knocking out that project only to find that your schedule has been hijacked and now includes 2 or 3 new meetings?  On top of that, your boss has suddenly found his “next hot thing” and sent you a dozen emails that leave you scratching your head as to (a) how they all relate to one another and (b) fit into the corporate strategy.  Adding insult to injury he also wants an action plan on how to handle those twelve seemingly unrelated emails… by EOD.  As you may have guessed, that project you wanted to finish never finds its way onto your desk and the worst part of it all is that finishing that project IS actually ON YOUR GOAL SHEET.  Go figure?

Reacting seems to be the only goal we need to define on our objective sheet for the year.  Forget getting any real work done. All that seems to matter anymore is getting through our email and meetings and making sure that everyone on the email chain knows we’re “on top of that”.  Maybe we should create an automatic outgoing email that simply replies to every message with “I’m on it”.  We’d be the company hero.  Does it really matter if we get anything done as long as people think we’re working on it?

Herein lies the problem.  Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottomline.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues.  How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

So is there any hope for reestablishing our productivity and becoming an agent of change rather than an instrument of reactionary behavior?  Here’s my list of things to do to obtain the Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.

Cleanup Your INBOX

In Get Your Productivity Groove On I discussed the problem of context switching between tasks and how it effects your overall performance.  Because the use of email is so prevalent in our society, my guess is you have lots of extraneous emails sitting in your INBOX; email from your relatives, mailing lists, newsletters, etc.  You should eliminate as many non-essential emails as you can and move them to a personal email address.   Less mail in your INBOX means less temptation to check it everytime you see your notification bar indicating “You’ve Got Mail”.  Less email checking means more focus and more focus means more real work.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  Everyone seems to hit “Reply All” and/or adds lots of people to the CC list because they think someone might be interested.  Well guess what… WE’RE NOT!  I have enough email that’s directly related to me, I don’t need email that MAY interest me.  If you think it’s important or relevant to me… send it TO: ME.  Many people I know have already resorted to filtering all CC’d email and placing them directly into archive folders.  Maybe you should too .

Train Yourself to Get Things Done  

In the book Getting Things Done by David Allen he defined a system for personal productivity that teaches people to evaluate incoming messages, make a decision and act.  It’s a great system, but may not be necessary if we just focus on a few simple steps to get back our lost productivity.

First, review your yearly objectives and establish whether they still make sense.  If you aren’t sure, schedule time with your manager so that you understand from a high level what you should be working on.  This is also a good way to review the company’s objectives and understand how your job makes “a difference”.

Secondly, create simple goals for each day that help you reach your objectives, and schedule time in your calendar to ensure you can work on those goals.  If you don’t, your schedule will undoubtedly be “hijacked” by someone else’s agenda.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”  –Paul J. Meyers

Thirdly, learn to focus again.  We’ve gotten so used to being interrupted throughout the course of the day that we’ve forgotten how to focus on the task at hand.  During your scheduled time to work on your daily goals, don’t check email, in fact turn it off, and don’t answer the phone.  These are the distractions that drain your productivity.  Focus on your work and only your work.  I’ve even heard of people who have taken to working on non-networked PCs just to minimize the chance they will be distracted by (a) email or IM or (b) distract themselves by surfing the web.  I haven’t gone this far yet, but if you find it difficult to stay on task, maybe pulling the networking cable is not such a bad idea.

Learn to Say “NO”

This one may be the hardest to actually do because noone likes to say “no”.  Probably somewhere deep in our subconscious we believe that saying “no” shows weakness.  If we say “no” our boss will think we can’t manage the load.  The contrary is probably closer to the truth.  By carefully analyzing your incoming work against your defined objectives you’ll prove to be a valuable asset in accomplishing the “important” work that implements your company’s strategy.  However, I’m not suggesting you say “no” to all incoming requests – just be careful in your analysis of what you’re being asked to do.  Is it important to the company’s objectives?  Are you the right person to accomplish the task?  Are there other time critical tasks you need to perform in order to meet your objectives?

Related Posts

Get Your Productivity Groove On

Lost Productivity

I distinctly remember my first experience with Twitter when I noticed someone casually mentioning they were “putting lipstick on at a redlight”.  My first thought was “this is totally worthless”.  My how times have changed.  Not only has the growth of Twitter been off the charts (1382% to be exact), but I’ve actually started using Twitter on a regular basis and find it extremely helpful and useful in my job.

Twitter can be tough to understand at first and there’s good reason for it; its a different communication model than most are used to.  How many times have you gone out on the street and starting talking to yourself and hoped that someone else would stop and listen?  Not many I’m guessing, but that’s more or less what Twitter allows you to do.  You say your piece and if someone’s there to hear great, if not, oh well.

On the surface this just seems silly (at least to me it did), however what you notice over time is that this model is very useful for discovering and developing new relationships if you use some basic principals to help you get started.  Using Twitter has helped me find Thought Leaders in different subject areas, kept me better informed about hot topics, and helped me develop a peer network with similar interests.  All this from a messaging system with a 140 character limit.  Wow!

How It Works?

Even though I’ve had an account on Twitter since 2007 I have only recently started using it in earnest and what a difference it’s made.  My blog traffic is up 50% over the last couple of months and I contribute much of the increase to my participation in Twitter.  What I think really helped me see the value in Twitter were #hashtags and retweets.  Hashtags are tags applied to a message with a prepended # marker (ie. #community, #opensource, #management).  These can be searched and allow you to find relevant subjects across all the Twitter postings.  Hashtags have enabled me to find pockets of information that I didn’t know existed by searching for a particular #term.  Retweets (RT) are when a user pushes a post from someone they follow into their network of followers.  Thereby giving their stamp of approval on the material.

I recently wrote a post entitled What Really Matters? which discussed the overabundance of information and our current lack of tools to help sift through that information.  Believe it or not Twitter is helping me sift through the voluminous amount of data that gets delivered to me daily.  While I don’t think it’s quite what I had in mind in my post, it is a  good start.  In the post I discuss how RSS Feeds have become too time consuming to manage and keep current with without some form of relevancy.  Twitter adds relevancy to the mix through the concept of retweeting (RT).  I’d guesstimate that about ~15-25% of the tweets I receive are article links with summaries.  Many of these articles are retweets.  When someone RTs an article, it usually means they’ve found it to be interesting and informative, and want to share it with their followers.  This means someone else has already reviewed the article for me and is telling me I should check it out.  Instant relevance.

All of this is well and good but how can you use Twitter to help you stay informed or build relationships with new people? …

Tip 1: Find People That Share Your Passion

Now, just following random people is not going to get you the kind of relevant material or people you’ll want to connect with, but that’s where #hashtags come in.  When I began to use Twitter in earnest, the first thing I did was to search for hashtags of interest to me.  Tags like #opensource, #collaboration, #e20, #linux, etc.  I then reviewed the tweets of people using these hashtags to find the most interesting Tweeters and followed them.  After a few weeks of this I’d assembled a list of people that were providing me with high quality information.  The bonus is that about 20-30% of these people follow me back.  So not only do I have access to a higher quality of info than my RSS Feeds, but I also have begun to establish a group of followers that I send messages to.

Tip 2: Be Authentic and Contribute

So getting back to my original question “have you ever gone into the street and talked to yourself?”, the answer in most cases is “no” (well maybe, but don’t tell anyone).  But from what I’ve just outlined it seems to work as long as you’re willing to listen first and be authentic with the community.  I think this is the key to making Twitter useful, even though the model for Twitter is individually blasting messages out.   It really only works when you are participating in the Twitter community in a genuine and useful way. If you constantly post messages about your product or company, or that you’re applying lipstick while at a red light, you’re unlikely to see any success on Twitter (unless of course you are a company that’s trying to keep customers informed).  You are ‘noise’ and will be treated as such.  However, if you are posting useful information and retweeting good stuff you’ll have far greater success because you’ll build trust amongst your followers.  I’m not suggesting that you can’t post information about products or companies, just that if that’s all you post you will quickly alienate your followers.  Twitter users are looking for people to follow, not marketing departments.  I think a good rule of thumb is that you shouldn’t have over 20% of your posts directly related to a single product or company.

Tip 3: Use Hashtags

“What about using #hashtags?” you ask.  Just as I found people to follow via #hashtags, you should use #hashtags with your outgoing messages so that others can find you.  Hashtags are a great way to quickly identify users who share common interests with you.  If you’ve written a cool blog post with some tips for community managers , tag it with #community.  This way other Twitter users interested in that topic can find you.  Note that these #hashtags sometimes change so you should do a quick search to make sure the tag is still relevant before using it in a post.

Another benefit of hashtags is that there are automated processes (bots) associated with some tags so that if you use the #hashtag it will be retweeted to other groups of users.  A few that I’m aware of are #linux, #techcrunch and #opensource.  If you use one of these tags your post will get pushed into a much larger network.  BEWARE you don’t want to abuse this privilege, in fact there are rumblings that Twitter will soon ban this practice so it may not be around much longer.

Tip 4:  Get Help

If you’re trying to figure Twitter out for your company and you’re new to social media, find the people around you who understand it.  This will probably not be your SVP of Marketing, but instead a younger, more connected member of the staff.  I can’t tell you how many times I wandered onto the Twitter homepage of a senior marketing professional and seen nothing useful at all.  All their tweets are about their company or products, that is, if they have any at all.  This is not how you embrace the Twitter community.

Find your experienced users and have them help you define a plan.  You may even want to empower them to help with your company’s branding through Twitter and other social media outlets.  They’ll at least be able to tell you what to do, and more importantly what NOT TO DO.

Tip 5:  Open Up and Let People In

This particular tip is aimed at companies trying to use Twitter to promote their products or services and doesn’t apply just to Twitter.  The salad days of product management traveling to large customers to get feedback for the next iteration of the product roadmap are over.  If you want to have people embrace and extend your brand, you have to listen and stop spewing marketing diarrhea from your orifices.  We are long past the days when people build a marginally good product, put tons of money into a marketing campaign, and see great results.  Word of mouth is just too fast to make this model viable any longer.  Current data shows that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust advertisers.  If you think you can market your way out of a crummy product today you have no idea just how wrong you are.

Twitter and other similar social media tools are your salvation.  You can actually find, and converse with the most important people you can imagine – your users.  Not just the CIO but real users.  I know what you’re thinking, “But the CIO is the one that makes all the decisions”.  You and I both know that this model is quickly dying too.  CIOs that implement crappy technology find the door pretty quickly today.  Users are the ones that hold the real power and that’s because they’re the ones that converse.  Conversation is the key to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and Web 4.0.  If you’re not conversing with your users, you’re dead!

Hope this helps.  I’ve found great value in Twitter and other social outlets since my initial reluctance.  My advice to you is to dive in, be AUTHENTIC, and try to learn.  If you’re not afraid to be honest and help other people along the way, you’ll do just fine .

P.S., I’m at @emcconne if you’d like to follow along

Let’s look at a simple fact …

The human mind does not process information in parallel (you may want to go back and read that again).  It just can’t be done.  The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.  In his book he uses a simple example that is very convincing.  Simply take a sheet of paper and draw a line across the page.  Above of the line you will write the alphabet, below it the numbers 1 to 26.  The kicker is that you write one letter and then one number, so you’d write ‘A’ above the line and ‘1′ below the line, then you’d write ‘B’ above the line and ‘2′ below the line, oscillating back and forth until done.  Time this exercise.  Next, time yourself writing just the alphabet and then just the numbers 1 to 26 in serial without switching back and forth.  If you’re like most people you’ll find that it takes about twice as long to do the first exercise as it does the second.  So think about that.  You did the same amount of work in both cases but it took you twice as long.  The only difference was context switching.  Unfortunately, context switching has become the “norm” in today’s offices.

People forget that multitasking isn’t about processing information in parallel, which we just proved was impossible.  Multitasking originally meant juggling or managing multiple tasks during a given period of time, not at the same time.  Somehow the definition was hijacked to mean something more akin to parallel processing.  Now people brag about how many conversations they can carry on at once, but based on what we now know, what they’re really saying is “Look at me, I’m getting less work done”.  Probably something you don’t want your boss to know .

The other thing to remember is that every communication channel has it’s own place and purpose in the world and changing conventions can be unproductive.  Email was born to replace memos and letters.  No one expected you to reply to a memo or letter within minutes of it being issued.  Your memos would gather in your mailbox and you’d pick them up once a day and work through the replies, just like you still pick up your mail once a day from the Post Office.  What’s changed is the use paradigm and expectations.  Now in this world of cell phones and computers that has people linked in everywhere, all the time, we expect immediate responses to our emails. It’s just not realistic.

Similarly, IM changed too.  Originally, it was a social activity done during off-hours.  You would log on to AIM from home when you were actually AVAILABLE and chat with your friends.  Now it’s moved into the workplace, but in doing so kept many of it’s conventions from when it was used at home, such as the default status of “Available”.  The same goes for Twitter.  What used to be an extracurricular activity has suddenly found it’s way onto workplace desktops.  Don’t get me wrong, all these things are useful tools in the right situation, but they need to find a productive place on our desks without being distracting.  NOTE TO SELF:  It’s ironic that I’ll be pimping this via Twitter? .

In 1971 the economist Herbert A. Simon wrote “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”  Sage wisdom, but how do you apply it today without seeming like a Technophobe and dropping “off the grid”.   One thing we can do is remember that newer technologies may have evolved under social circumstances and not business ones.  This means the conventions which were adopted may be perfectly okay at home, but detrimental to the “Productive Desktop”.

Here are a few other tips to reclaim some of your productivity…

Remember when we where in school and had to write all those tedious papers.  Our teachers taught us to use outlines to organize our objectives and ideas.  We need to revisit that same strategy now.  Before logging on to your computer in the morning or after lunch, simply write down what your goals for the next few hours are and what tasks need to get done.  The point here is to set mini-goals for yourself and make sure you understand the steps necessary to achieve those goals.

The next thing on my list may surprise some, Internet Relay Chat (or just chat).  Chat has been around since the dawn of the Internet but evolved mostly in technical communities.  Chat has a different usage paradigm than the “ever distracting” IM.  It’s a communal technology which means its goal is to gather users with similar interests together into a real-time forum.  Once together they can ask questions of the entire group and not specific users.  This means users of the group can monitor the room at their own pace and ask or answer questions to a group of participants.  The goal of IRC is not to query specific users but give participants a forum in which many people are participating simultaneously which reduces the burden on a single user.  Open-source projects use chat all the time but it hasn’t been widely adopted in the business community which is a real shame given it’s advantages over IM.

The thing about IM is that it’s a direct connection to your attention especially since most users maintain the default status of ‘Available’ (that’s just asking for trouble).  I’d say my biggest distracter is currently IM when my status is ‘Available’, but what can you do?  During those periods when you know you need to focus, simply set your IM status to “Do Not Disturb”.  People will rarely bother you if your status is something other than “Available”.

Another great tip for regaining productivity is to only check for email, RSS, or Twitter updates every so often.  Set aside some amount of time in the morning and in the afternoon to go through your email and feed updates.  You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done when your email or RSS icon isn’t flashing at you constantly.

There are several ways to try to take back your life and I’ve only covered but a few here.   The key is to be proactive and manage technology and information the way you manage everything else in your life.  Too much of anything (even a good thing) is often bad.

If you are looking for some good books to read I’d suggest Getting Things Done by David Allen and the Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.
Related Posts:

What Really Matters?
Lost Productivity
What does Potential Energy and Collaboration Have in Common?
In Defense of Distraction

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