My Thanksgiving “fun facts” blog was a big hit with readers, generating a lot of buzz (who doesn’t want something that makes life, especially those large family gatherings, easier?). So with the annual visit from the dude in the red suit almost upon us, I thought it would be fun to do another round of dinner conversation starters and brain stretchers.

Keep in mind as you read these that exposing yourself to diverse sources of information — even those that seem to have nothing to do with your business — is a great way to stimulate the brain and spur innovation.

Let’s start with everyone’s favorite dinner table subject: body parts.

• The blue whale’s tongue weighs about as much as an adult elephant.
• After circumcision, human foreskins are sold to biomedical companies and used as an ingredient in anti-wrinkle gels. (Think about that the next time you try to take a few years off your look!)
• A single square inch of skin on the human hand contains 72 feet of nerves.
• The human ear contains about 4,000 wax glands.
• In one hour, your heart burns enough energy to raise a ton of lead three feet off the ground. A pumping human heart can squirt blood as far as 30 feet.
• One to two percent of Americans have an extra nipple somewhere on their body.

Next we move on to the amazing world we live in, which is part of an even more awe-inspiring universe:

• Need to stock up for your New Year’s Eve party? According to scientists, the largest supply of alcohol resides in a vast alcohol cloud in the Milky Way that measures 288 billion miles across.
• Saturn has such a low density, that if placed in water, it would float.
• If there was no air between its atoms, the Earth would be about the size of a baseball.
• Nearly three-fourths of all the fresh water in the world is in Canada.
• What do Eric Clapton and all four of the Beatles have in common (besides a boatload of musical talent)? All have an asteroid named after them.
• At a steady pace of 6 mph, it would take a jogger 173 days to circle the earth.
• You can tell the temperature (in Fahrenheit degrees) by listening to a cricket chirp. Count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and then add 37.
• Siberia gets so cold that boiling water poured from a pot can freeze before it hits the ground.
• The state of Alaska has 40 active volcanoes, more than any other state in the U.S.

And wrapping up again with some more totally random facts:

• Before making it big, Jimi Hendrix played as the opening act for The Monkees on several occasions.
• Christopher Columbus’ ship, the Santa Maria, weighed less than the rudder on the Titanic.
• One out of five American meals is eaten in a car.
• It’s about 10 times easier to shoot a hole-in-one-while golfing than it is to bowl a perfect 300 game.
• Every day, 500 Americans are injured in their bathtub.
• Keeping mothballs in your tool chest will help to prevent rust.
• A single ounce of gold can be stretched into a wire 65 miles long.
• Pope John Paul II was an honorary Harlem Globetrotter. (But could he dunk?)
• Party on! Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence while drinking beer in a tavern.

Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for a prosperous New Year!

2012 is almost upon us. And I have some good news and some bad news in regards to the year ahead.

The bad news? If you think you’re running fast now, get yourself some new track shoes, because the world isn’t slowing down. In fact, it will continue to go faster and get more complex as time goes by. The good news is that we can turn this challenge into an opportunity by embracing three simple leadership strategies.

1. Get clear about winning.

I don’t mean partially clear, or sort of clear. I mean crystal clear on what winning looks like for your organization.

Become obsessive about winning, defining it with as much specificity as possible. Talk about it all the time with employees and other key stakeholders. Put visual reminders around you. Prompt yourself via your smart phone. Make sure every meeting starts out talking about winning. Embed your definition of winning into all your ways of working.

The hard part is that we can no longer define winning once, and then let it go. We now have to constantly revise and update our picture of winning as the world changes around us. We need to continually think about winning, continually fine-tune our version of winning, and continually move towards it while bringing our employees along with us.

2. Shed your outdated ways of looking at the world.

What gets in the way of winning?

More often than not, it’s our old ideas about what we “know to be true” about our customers, markets, and industries. It’s our brain’s natural tendency to screen in information that agrees with our view of the world and screen out data that contradicts it. And it’s our thought bubbles (unspoken thoughts and assumptions) that tell us what made us successful in the past will continue to make us successful in the future.

I’m not saying all old ideas are bad. But when our world changes so quickly, we need to make a habit of checking our ideas, assumptions, and beliefs on a regular basis. And by regular, I mean every few months, at minimum. Once a year will not cut it!

Start by gathering information on what you know to be true. Not what you assume, speculate or hope, but what you know to be true through verifiable data. For example, aging populations, changing employee demographics, shifting customer communication channels, etc. Then compare this data with what you think you know to be true.

Put the two data sets together and begin to explore:

• Of what we know to be true, what is no longer true? Why?
• What has changed with our customers? Our industry?
• What new wants or needs do our customers have?
• What new services or products can we come up with to meet those needs?
• How could we redefine value in our market?

3. Slow down to go fast.

I’ve been talking about this concept for several years, and it becomes even more important in 2012.

Slowing down to go fast requires pausing from time to time, challenging your beliefs and assumptions, learning to think differently, and focusing on opportunities to add value to customers in ways that nobody else is doing. It also involves setting yourself up to win by creating space for your brain to ponder, wonder, explore, and connect.

For example, start meetings by asking, “When we have done this incredibly well, how will we have done it?” This will prompt your brain to look for solutions rather than what’s in the way. Winning is about subtle shifts in language and behavior each and every day. Ultimately, it comes down to whether you’re looking for solutions or talking about, and focusing on, roadblocks.

Spotting the winners

It’s easy to tell the companies that have a clear picture of winning versus those that don’t. For example, Southwest Airlines is really clear on their mission as the low-cost provider. No baggage fees. No change fees. Constantly fine-tuning faster ways to load the airplane. They get it, their employees get it, and so do their loyal customers.

Counter this with American Airlines, which recently filed for bankruptcy. I frequently fly American because I live in San Diego and have limited options. I have no clue how their leadership defines winning, but I am guessing it varies dramatically from their flight attendants and gate personnel. I often wonder if their idea of winning is to see how badly they can tick off their passengers every day.

When it comes to winning, make sure everyone in your ecosystem gets it. Not just employees, but suppliers, vendors, partners, alliances, and even (and especially) your customers. When you’re a winner, it’s obvious to those who meet you and work with you.

Get clear on winning in 2012. Start looking at the world differently. And slow down to go fast so that you can focus on solutions rather than what’s getting in the way. Winning is not only good for your business, it’s a lot more fun!

When I ask business leaders to identify which part of the innovation process their organizations struggle with the most, I typically get one of three answers:

1. We have a lot of ideas but most of them get judged as impossible or too hard to implement based on changing the way things currently are
2. We have a hard time deciding which idea or opportunity to pursue
3. We come up with a lot of good ideas but can’t seem to execute on them

Interestingly, these align exactly with the phases of innovation: discovery, evaluation, and execution.

In business, innovation is the act of applying knowledge to the creation of new processes, products, and services that have value for at least one of your stakeholder groups. Obviously, this requires more than just generating a slew of creative ideas.

In order to produce true innovation, you have to actually do something different that has value. In other words, follow through on the good ideas. This requires a very different set of skills and resources than idea generation. If you’re not getting any traction with your innovation efforts, it may be that your organization lacks the skills and competencies to complete one or more of the following phases.

Phase I – Discovery

Phase I has two basic objectives: developing core innovation competencies and generating new and creative ideas, which often includes gathering customer insights and translating them into workable ideas.

Everyone has the ability to think creatively, but most people need some training and coaching in order to bring out those latent abilities. Key activities during this phase include providing learning sessions, workshops, collaboration fairs, ideation boot camps, and other tools that teach people how to think differently.

Innovation enablers during this phase include:

• Encouraging and rewarding idea generation
• Awareness of the brain’s processing and potential hurdles
• Defining winning/excellence
• Balancing big picture and details
• Challenging assumptions
• “What if?” thinking
• Changing perspectives
• Considering the right answer
• Influencing others effectively

Key players during this phase: individual contributors and managers who encourage and support them.

Phase II – Evaluation

This phase separates the wheat from the chaff, as potential ideas and opportunities undergo a rigorous screening process. New ideas are discussed, tested, evaluated, and compared for their potential to add value to customers, generate new revenue streams, or accomplish a specific innovation goal. The primary objective is to identify the highest-value opportunities and determine the feasibility of turning them into reality.

Innovation enablers during this phase include:

• Creating and supporting an idea evaluation framework
• Taking risks
• Balancing day-to-day versus longer term
• Accepting ideas (remain open)
• Looking for “and” versus “but” solutions
• Encouraging some failure (within boundaries)
• Thinking cross-functionally/organizationally

Key players during this phase: managers and leaders who have set clear strategic direction and guidance.

Phase III – Execution

This phase involves making sure that the high-value opportunities identified during the evaluation phase align with your organizational capabilities. Then senior management has to commit the time, money, and resources to make the innovation happen. This is followed by close tracking of the business performance of the new product or service, as well as measuring the process used to develop the innovation and looking for ways to improve it.

Innovation enablers during this phase include:

• Continually communicating the need for innovation as a business focus/strategic mandate
• Linking innovation to key strategies
• Sponsoring innovation projects
• Incorporating innovation reports into the business review processes
• Funding innovation
• Developing risk management strategies and approaches
• Capturing and sharing innovation learnings
• Learning from failures

Key players during this phase: senior management/leaders.

The added benefits of innovation

When innovation becomes a way of life in your organization, you get a lot more than just new products and services.

The organizational mindset shifts to one of relentless improvement, with an increased awareness of opportunities and possibilities for products and efficiencies. There is more listening, less knee-jerk defending of old ideas, and a greater understanding of, and interest in, unmet customer needs.

As individuals begin to understand their roles in the innovation process, you get more clarity on what success looks like and how to achieve it. Standards of performance increase, along with an increased willingness and ability to hold each other accountable for meeting them.

Most important, as you begin to develop a sustainable innovation approach, the emphasis tends to shift from maintaining old successes to considering new opportunities and products – a key element in staying ahead of changing customer needs rather than always trying to catch up.

If you struggle to get new products to market, ask yourself, “Where are we getting stuck? What skills and competencies do we need to develop to move forward?” When you have all the pieces in place to successfully complete all stages, innovation becomes your way of working, not a project or initiative that goes away when the next business buzzword gains prominence!

Everyone knows that innovation means coming up with the next great idea in your industry, right? Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that. Test your ability to separate innovation fact from fiction by answering the following questions true or false:

1. Innovation is the act of coming up with new and creative ideas.
2. Innovation is a random process.
3. Innovation is the exclusive realm of a few naturally talented people.
4. The biggest obstacle to innovation is a lack of organizational resources and know-how.
5. The most important type of innovation involves bringing new products and services to market.
6. Teaching employees to think creatively will guarantee innovation.
7. The most powerful way to trigger your brain is to simply ask it a question.
8. Most companies pursue incremental rather than disruptive innovation.
9. Most companies are not structured to innovate.
10. Listening to your customers is a great way to innovate.

Answers:

1. False. In business, innovation is the act of applying knowledge, new or old, to the creation of new processes, products, and services that have value for at least one of your stakeholder groups. The key word here is applying. Generating creative ideas is certainly part of the process. But in order to produce true innovation, you have to actually do something different that has value.

2. False. Innovation is a discipline that can (and should) be planned, measured, and managed. If left to chance, it won’t happen.

3. False. Everyone has the power to innovate by letting their brain wander, explore, connect, and see the world differently. The problem is that we’re all running so fast that we fail to make time for the activities that allow our brains to see patterns and make connections. Such as pausing and wondering….what if?

4. False. In most organizations, the biggest obstacle to innovation is what people already know to be true about their customers, markets, and business. Whenever you’re absolutely, positively sure you’re right, any chance at meaningful innovation goes out the window.

5. False. It’s certainly important to bring new products and services to market. But the most important form of innovation, and the #1 challenge for today’s business leaders may really be reinventing the way we manage ourselves and our companies.

6. False. New ideas are a dime a dozen. The hard part is turning those ideas into new products and services that customers value and are willing to pay for — a process that requires knowledge about what your customers want and need, coupled with implementation.

7. True. Ask a question and the brain responds instinctually to get closure. The key with innovation is to ask questions that open people to possibilities, new ways of looking at the same data, and new interpretations of the same old thing.

8. True. Most companies focus on using internally generated ideas to produce slightly better products (incremental innovation). Then they strive to get those slightly better products to market as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. This approach is quicker and cheaper than disruptive innovation. But it rarely generates the results that lead to sustainable market leadership.

9. True. Most organizations are physically set up with accounting in one area, marketing in another, and management off by itself. Employees rarely interact with other departments unless they need something to get their jobs done. And leaders and departments often withhold information, believing that it puts them in a position of power. Innovation requires teamwork, communication and collaboration, not isolated silos.

10. Trick question! The answer is “it depends.” Research shows that customers can be a good source of ideas for improving existing products and services — if you’re looking to achieve incremental innovation. However, by itself, customer research is not sufficient for generating disruptive innovation because it only uncovers expressed, or known, customer needs. Disruptive innovation solves problems that customers didn’t even know they had or were unable to clearly articulate to themselves or their vendors. It redefines the market at a very fundamental level or, in many cases, creates a new market.

If you got 8 or more correct answers, give yourself a pat on the back. If you scored between 4 and 7, I recommend some more research and work on these critical leadership skills. If you scored less than 4, wake up and smell the burnt coffee! Get some help.

If you’re not constantly looking to improve your products, services, systems, and managerial processes, you will fall behind. And once you fall behind, it can be very difficult and often impossible to catch up!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a stodgy safety products manufacturer that dramatically increased sales of its goggles by studying fashion trends. I’m not suggesting we all start subscribing to Vogue, Glamour or Elle (although maybe that is not a bad idea). What we do need to do is start looking beyond the walls of our businesses on a regular basis.

Innovation doesn’t always require pulling groundbreaking ideas out of thin air. In fact, in today’s markets innovation increasingly comes from two sources: learning to see patterns where others don’t, and finding ways to adapt what others are already doing to our business models. For most of us, this requires expanding our sources of information, as well as stretching our brains to get us thinking differently and looking at the world in new ways.

Expand your sources of information

Over the course of a single year, the typical American reads 100 newspapers and 36 magazines, and watches almost 2,500 hours of television. We also listen to more than 700 hours of radio, buy three books and 20 CDs, and talk on the phone for more than 500 hours. And that doesn’t include texts, tweets, updates, pokes, and all the other social media stuff many of us now do on a daily basis.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Maybe so, but for most people it comes from the same sources over and over again, especially in business. As leaders, we tend to gather data about our customers, markets, and industries from similar sources while paying scant attention to what goes on outside our companies or industry.

To expand your data-gathering horizons, make a list of all your information sources according to the percentage of data they provide. Then ask questions like: How much time do we spend collecting information? What are our primary sources of data? Are these still reliable sources for our business or industry? Where else can we look?

Conduct a cold-eye review

Another technique for gaining fresh perspectives is to have non-experts research various aspects of your business. For example, have your CFO look at customer data, your head of manufacturing look at customer info, and so on. When done well, this “cold eye review” often finds the obvious (things previously missed because everyone is used to them) and occasionally finds the unique.

Cold eye reviewers can uncover unsafe conditions in a plant because workers stopped seeing the situation a long time ago. They can identify new applications for a current product because they don’t know what it’s supposed to do or not do. They can also uncover significant opportunities to reduce costs, cut cycle time, and/or dramatically shift processes because they don’t know about the way things “are supposed to be.”

Have your cold eye reviewer give a presentation that communicates their general approach to the review, the data found, a summary of key points, and any recommendations. Follow that up with any questions you might have, and a discussion of what is possible based on the data presented.

Stimulate your brain

In order to adapt ideas from other areas, it helps to loosen up our brains with the following techniques:

• Go outside. Go outside your office, take off your shoes, and walk barefoot in the grass. Breathe deeply and just listen to the sounds. You’ll be amazed how these simple tactile sensations can take your brain in a whole different direction.
• Stretch. I mean really stretch – first your body and then your mind. Stand up and lift your arms above your head. Roll your shoulders. Inhale and exhale slowly. Now pause and think about something from a different perspective. Ask yourself, “What if it could be different? What if there is a better way? Who have I met this week and what did I learn from them? How can I apply what I learned?”
• Do a “walking sponge” session. Take a walk and try to absorb as many new ideas as you can. Turn off your thinker and focus on seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling.
• Daydream. Let your mind wander. Instead of trying to think of an idea or solution, don’t try. Let your subconscious work on it for a while.

If these don’t grab you, just try something different. If you’re right-handed, use your left. Drive home from work a different way. If you bring a sandwich for lunch every day, bring a salad. Or better still, try a kind of food you’ve never had before.

Trying something familiar in a different way just might loosen up your thinking and let you see the world in a different way. You’ll be amazed at what putting on a new pair of goggles can reveal to you (and you’ll look really fashionable doing it)!

Thanksgiving is almost upon us.

And while I have much to be thankful for, both personally and professionally, I’m “thinking outside the turkey” and doing something different for this year’s Thanksgiving blog.

As business leaders, I believe it’s important that we expand our sources of information beyond the walls of our businesses and industries. This allows us to identify patterns and make connections that we might not otherwise see. I also believe it’s important to pause from time to time and ask “What if….?”

But sometimes it’s just as important to pause and have some fun. In fact, that’s a large part of what holidays are for. So this year, I’m serving up some “fun facts” that I have discovered in my personal quest for off-the-wall data sources. These come courtesy of “That’s A Fact Jack” and “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader” — two of my favorite sources for random information.

Food plays a major role in this holiday, so I’m starting off with some fun food facts:

• The world’s oldest surviving recipe is a formula for making beer. It was discovered outside Baghdad in 1850 on a 3,800 year-old Sumerian clay tablet. Two other tablets contain what are believed to be drinking songs.
• 25% of all the vegetables consumed in the U.S. are French fries.
• 17% of all American restaurants are pizzerias.
• The busiest McDonald’s in the world sits in Pushkin Square in Moscow.
• Soda accounts for 25 percent of all the beverages consumed in the U.S.
• Starbucks spends more on employee health insurance than it does on coffee beans.
• There are more Subway sandwich shops in Manhattan than there are actual subway stations.
• It takes a Twinkie about 45 seconds to explode when cooked in a microwave.

Now, here are some people/lifestyle facts that say a lot about our current society:

• Twelve percent of American males have shaved while driving.
• A single day’s trash from New York City would fill the Empire State Building.
• The Bible is the most shoplifted book in the world.
• During their lifetime, the average person spends 5.5 weeks brushing their teeth.
• Eighty percent of American men say that if given the chance, they would marry the same woman again. Only 50 percent of women say they would marry the same man.
• More blond hair dye is sold in Dallas than any other city in the U.S.
• One in 10 Americans abstains from sex. Only one in 50 abstains from television.

And closing, here are some totally random but interesting facts:

• In Bangkok, there exists a 240-foot temple made entirely of broken dishes.
• Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. (He didn’t even make the finals).
• In 1994, a man escaped from a West Virginia prison using a “rope” made of dental floss.
• During their lifetime, the average person sheds over 98 feet of eyelashes.
• Washington D.C. has more psychiatrists per capita than any other city in the U.S.

I hope you enjoyed these and they take your brain in some new and interesting directions when you share them over your holiday dinner table. Happy Thanksgiving!

Are you finding it harder to stay focused at work these days?

Welcome to the club! It’s been estimated that distractions and interruptions steal up to two hours per day of productive time for the average worker. And as new technologies make the world increasingly interconnected, it looks like it will only get worse – if we let it.

What’s stealing our time and attention away from the activities that matter most?

The usual stuff: phone calls, voice mail, email, Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, Blackberries, interruptions from co-workers. We’re all familiar with these. But there’s a subtler and even more pervasive time-stealer in the workplace — our own thoughts.

The fact is, our own mental distractions drain huge amounts of creative energy. They keep us entranced and prevent us from tapping into our creative resources. When some of our attention is occupied by the past or future, we prevent ourselves from focusing on the present. When we’re distracted and mentally agonizing over the next thing that pops up on our lists, any chance of meaningful innovation goes right out the window.

What keeps us distracted? See if you recognize these common innovation dousers:

• Single thought. Relying on a single idea or plan to see your project through.
• Getting really worried. Worry is misdirected creative energy. Anxiety makes the creative flame burn in all the wrong places.
• Not having fun. When you stop having fun, the task becomes burdensome.
• Getting easily frustrated. The harder you work at being frustrated, the better you’ll get at it.
• Exaggerated importance. Making your challenge so important or all-consuming that you allow it to ruin the rest of your life.
• Knowing the right answers. You’re so convinced that you have all the answers that you stop entertaining or looking for alternatives.
• Running it through a committee. Nothing destroys individual initiative like a committee. Relying on a committee often denies personal responsibility, which eliminates the thrill of taking the risk. Having too many meetings to “discuss it” (which really means “listening to individual agendas”) wastes time and doubles the cost.
• Setting inappropriate deadlines. Make them too short and the task becomes impossible. Too long, and you lose interest in the project.

Relax and refocus

Fortunately, reclaiming your mental focus doesn’t require major surgery. Simply relax your muscles and concentrate on your breathing to center your attention. Then take a piece of paper and, as quickly as you can, write down any issues that come to mind. It doesn’t matter how pressing or trivial the concern. If it comes to mind, write it down.

Keep writing until you have nothing more to write. When you’re done, step back, look at your list, and acknowledge that you will deal with each concern at the appropriate time. This undermines the power of those issues to distract you, and makes it possible to give your full attention to the activity at hand.

Another great approach to dealing with distractions is to get clear on what inspires your innovative side. Identify what keeps you really focused and intensely determined, and build more of this into your day. For example:

• Necessity. Nothing sharpens the attention better than demands.
• Fun. Having a great time makes the juices flow.
• Boldness. Jumping right into a situation with both feet.
• Speed. Doing it as fast as you can.
• Shooting from the hip. Starting without a plan and applying ideas as they come to you.
• Taking risk. A real risk, without a safety net. Feeling the crisp bite of fear and dread, but going ahead with it anyway. The threat of failure lights a fire like no other!
• Pride. Taking pleasure in success and accomplishment.
• Time pressure. Feeling the rush of the deadline.
• Mental sparks. Feeling bold, standing out in the crowd, and getting noticed.
• Trust in last-minute inspiration. Having faith in your ability to pull the project out of the fire.
• Relaxing. Loosening your grip of life’s worries.
• Reflection. Having a private time and space to contemplate your navel.

The emails, Tweets and constant barrage of interruptions aren’t going away any time soon. And neither are our internal distractions. So identify the ones that hinder you the most and take appropriate action to defuse them. You’ll get a lot more done throughout the day. And you’ll be surprised at what your innovative side comes up with.

What do Velcro, barbed wire, and chainsaws have in common? They were all patterned after structures found in nature.

Velcro was invented in 1941 by Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral. After returning home from a hunting trip, he noticed a large amount of cockleburs stuck to his clothes and his dog’s fur. Out of curiosity, he stuck a few under a microscope and saw that each bur consisted of hundreds of little hooks that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing or animal fur. He surmised that if he could duplicate the hooks and loops with other materials, he could bind them together in a similar fashion.

When ranchers first began raising cattle on the wide-open plains, they used the Osage orange as fencing material. But the thorny bush took a lot of time and effort to transplant and grow. Eventually, someone hit on the idea of fashioning wire fences patterned after the Osage’s sharp thorns. This innovation made it affordable to fence vast areas of land, and led to the practice of animal husbandry on a much larger scale.

Nature also provided the inspiration for the modern chainsaw. In 1946, a man chopping wood in Oregon noticed several timber beetle larvae chewing through the logs around him. A short while later, he developed a chain with interlocking links that mimicked the chewing action of their teeth. This led to the development of the first chainsaw that could cut with, or against, the grain of the wood.

These three innovative products have something else in common. They were developed using one of the most important parts of human intelligence — our ability to form patterns.

The human brain has an amazing capacity to take in large amounts of data, sift and analyze it, and then form patterns. In our caveman days, this kind of pattern recognition coupled with instant and consistent response was a good thing. It allowed us to quickly identify predators, remember the location of food and water sources, and engage in other activities that supported our survival.

Humans also excel at forming patterns and making connections because the subconscious mind likes closure. When faced with an incomplete picture, the brain works to complete the mental image by inferring the missing information. The brain works the same way on an unsolved problem or challenge; it loves to dive right in and get the job done. Our minds fill in shapes and patterns based on our expectations and assumptions.

Connections can be based on differences as well as similarities. For example, our minds easily connect chair and table, ham and eggs, brother and sister. To enhance your ability to see patterns and make connections, start looking for them in everyday things:

• Junk mail. Scan your mail before you throw it out. What new trends do you see in advertising and marketing? What new products and values catch your eye? Let your junk mail accumulate for a month and take note of what you see when you pause and go through it.
• Popular music. What are the trends in music? Is it getting louder or softer? More intimate or more intimidating? Is it more culturally diverse? Have the instruments changed? Do radio stations play more or less variety than five years ago?
• Bookstores. Are there any consistent topics among best-sellers? What about magazine covers? What values does popular culture display? Why are they portrayed as such?
• TV shows. What are the trends in prime-time television? What kinds of characters are portrayed on family shows now? Why are there plenty of shows about doctors, lawyers, and police, and so few about scientists, politicians, and engineers?
• TV commercials. What products or services do you see advertised the most? Are there new production techniques, or are old ones being revived? What time of day are the best commercials on? The worst? Who is the intended audience for a particular commercial?

Original ideas come from recognizing new connections between familiar things and transforming them into something new. So the next time you see a pattern — whether it comes from a beetle grub chewing through a log, or the pile of junk mail sitting on your countertop — pause for a moment and ask yourself, “How can I relate this to something I already know well?” You’ll be amazed at what you can come up with!

Fashion and safety goggles.

You won’t see these words used very often in the same sentence. Unless you happen to be a $2 billion manufacturer of personal safety apparel. In which case, they go together quite nicely.

When I worked for the world’s most valuable brand, every year the chief marketing officer would fly to Paris to attend one of the major fashion shows. His goal was to pick up on all the different colors, styles, and looks on display. When I asked what those things had to do with our product, he replied, “It all depends on how you look at it.”

I often pondered and finally learned to adapt his approach. In today’s world, one of the best ways to foster innovation in our organizations is to pick up on trends in other spaces and apply them to our own. I sometimes call it looking at things with a ‘cold eye’. The less you know about something, the more likely you are to see new ideas.

For example, a few years ago I worked with a $2 billion personal protection company to help create their strategic plan. This company made safety goggles, respiratory masks, earplugs, and other safety products worn by individuals at work. Their goggles were strong and durable, but ugly as sin and uncomfortable to wear (think about those clear plastic, one size does not fit anyone goggles worn in many factories). Sales had recently gone flat, and management called me in to see if we could determine innovative new approaches and products in their markets.

This company had a long track record of success. Managers were very set in their ways. And they were certain they knew what their customers wanted. Clearly the time had come to think outside the goggles!

During the planning process I asked them to do two things: take a look at the fashion industry, and learn more about their customers. They agreed to both, although with a fair amount of skepticism, and began researching the fashion industry to come up with some ideas on how to improve their goggles.

In doing so, they found that the majority of people wearing safety goggles at work were women. More important, they found that their customers wanted more than just to protect their eyes. They also wanted to look good and feel comfortable while wearing the goggles.

Keep in mind that this was a stodgy, male-oriented company whose leaders had been in manufacturing forever. They knew how to build quality goggles to protect the eyes. But they never dreamed that something else might matter to their customers — until they asked.

To their credit, they took what they learned and embedded it into a new line of fashionable safety goggles. To their surprise, sales increased dramatically the following year.

Had this company looked only within their industry, they might have never discovered those unmet customer needs. By changing their perspective and looking for ideas in other places, those needs became obvious. And by looking at an industry that seemingly had no connection with theirs, they came up with several good ideas for improving their products and adding more value to their customers.

The moral of this story is two-fold. One, never (and I mean never!) assume that we know everything about our customers or deeply understand them just because we have been successful selling them the same thing for decades. And two, as our world grows ever more complex and interconnected, we need to develop the habit of looking at new sources of information to prompt our own brains to consider innovative possibilities. Specifically, we need to:

• Broaden the scope of where we look for ideas, information, and opportunities
• Let go of old “truths” and see the world from a fresh perspective
• Learn to see patterns where others don’t (or at least spot them before anyone else does)
• Find ways to take what others are already doing (in seemingly disparate sectors) and adapt it to our way of doing business

No problem, right?

Actually it is a problem. Otherwise we would all be featured on the cover of Time Magazine as the next Steve Jobs. The former head of Apple was certainly an innovative thinker in his own right. But what he did better than anyone else was to look at what already existed in the world and put things together in ways that no one else had considered. He also excelled at figuring out what customers wanted before they knew it themselves.

Jobs had an intuitive gift for seeing what others didn’t see. But this ability to “look outside the goggles” is a skill that all business leaders can (and should) learn. Stay tuned next week for some tools and techniques to help you develop this critical leadership skill.

I just returned from one of my longer road trips of the year, and it’s great to be home!

Believe it or not, I used to enjoy business travel. But now, with all the airport security, flight delays, baggage fees, and surly attitudes of airline employees, it has become the least favorite part of what I do for a living. I still love working with different clients around the country. But the ‘getting there’ has become a wearisome task I would gladly eliminate if I could.

I did, however, have a real eye-opener on this latest trip.

I always caution my clients about the importance of not falling victim to our thought bubbles (the unspoken attitudes, assumptions and beliefs that govern how we think and act in the world). While sitting in yet another airport waiting for my flight to board, I experienced a vivid reminder of just how powerful they can be.

One of my pet peeves with air travel has always been how long it takes to board the airplane. Apparently I’m not alone, because while reading The Week magazine I came across an article about an astrophysicist who thinks he’s devised a better way. In fact, he believes his method, which he has tested using computer modeling and real people, would cut boarding times in half.

His approach goes like this: first seat families and anyone else needing assistance. Then, instead of seating groups of passengers from back to front as airlines currently do, fill all the window seats first. Start at the back of the plane and move forward by odd or even rows (30A, 28A, 26A, etc.) – but only on one side of the plane. When that side is full, repeat this process on the other side. When all the window seats are filled, use the same pattern to fill the middle seats and then the aisles.

The astrophysicist calculates that his method could save airlines hundreds of millions of dollars per year, not to mention a bushel of time for passengers. But so far he hasn’t heard from a single airline.

Here’s where the thought bubbles come in.

You might think that my initial response would have been, “What a great idea!” Or that I would have rushed up to the counter and asked the airline employees to give it a try. But no. The first thought that came into my head was one that has been repeated countless times in corporate boardrooms around the world: that will never work!

And then, to reinforce my not-so-original thought, my brain immediately began filling in all the reasons why it wouldn’t work. The airlines would have to retrain employees and change all their procedures. Passengers would have to show up on time and have their boarding passes ready. Frequent flyers would have to give up their priority boarding positions. Everyone would have to pay close attention to which seat was boarding at what time. People will never change their behavior in airports. That’s just the way it is.

You might also think that as the reigning “guru of thought bubbles” I would have immediately caught myself and said, “Holly, you silly! Stop indulging in your thought bubbles. You know better than that!” Instead, when my brain ran out of thought bubbles about why the idea wouldn’t work, I merely turned the page of the magazine and moved on to the next article. And sat there waiting while the plane boarded very slowly.

It wasn’t until I got home several hours later and mentioned it to my husband that the lights came on. Here was an idea that could potentially save millions of dollars while streamlining a major time-wasting activity. Yet I rejected it out of hand based on unproven assumptions bubbling up from my subconscious.

I don’t know if this idea will work or not. After all, it would require major behavioral change on the part of the airlines and passengers. But 9/11 sure changed our behavior in terms of the security measures we’re willing to put up with. And so far we have no hard data that this boarding method won’t work. So who knows?

The real issue for business leaders is how many times in our companies do we kill a good idea or overlook a potential opportunity because “it will never work”? And that’s the real danger of thought bubbles. When we’re buying into ours (because they reinforce what we want to believe), someone else might be challenging theirs and looking at things very differently. And that someone could be the next competitor that puts us out of business.

United, Delta, American, Southwest – there’s a guy out there who doesn’t buy into the thought bubble that we can’t board your airplanes more efficiently. Are you listening?