The Movies

You ever wanted to go to a holiday movie because everyone you know is saying they want to go to that movie. Even though you don't know exactly what you're all in for?

That's the way it is for all Next Big Things. Everyone wants in. Even if they're not sure why.

This is the moment when everyone's getting swept up. And it's a moment when great opportunity is at hand.

Here are a couple of thoughts that may come in handy at times like these.

First, is simple awareness that everyone wants in. As in the case of stuff like Facebook and Twitter these days. These are movies everyone wants to see right now.

How can you tell? The Odd Factor helps me. I start seeing swept up moments when I hear odd chatter in odd spots. Like when I heard two seniors in a Starbucks talking about connecting on Facebook. That ranked high on my Odd Factor. And helped me see everyone wants in on this movie.

Second thought is if you're aware of all the people going to the movie sweeping up at the box office, how great would it be if you're the one selling the popcorn?

Who wants to be the guy selling liver and onions at the movie everyone wants to see?

--tim

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What Job Is Your Product Being Hired For?

This is the million dollar question asked by Harvard business guru, Clayton Christensen.

He's a big thinker when it comes to the art of innovation. Whether working on The Next Big Thing or simply trying to figure it out, this is a guy I love to learn from.

FRIDAY'S POST just came across a recent talk by Professor Christensen to a group of educators. Lordy, if there's a category ever in need of disruptive innovation, our schools, from kindergarten all the way through university, have to be among those most in need of serious transformation. Maybe it ought to be required viewing for every educator drawing a paycheck today.

Professor Christensen's research suggests that the job kids hire schools for is to help them feel more successful, and have time and a place to enjoy their friends. When schools fail to do the job, the Professor says kids will look to fill unmet needs by eventually dropping out or video-gaming or mallrat-packing or gang-banging.

In my state, Minnesota, only about a quarter of today's ninth graders will make it through college. That's a troubling statistic in this global high-tech knowledge economy of ours. Makes you wonder if schools get the message they aren't doing the job they're hired for very well anymore.

Oh, by the way, if you believe technology in the classroom is the answer, it's not says Professor Christensen. He says don't look for much impact from all those spiffy new computers in the classroom, unless it's accompanied by new models of teaching.

This brings to mind our friend Fred the Math Teacher and his model of doing school backward, featured in one of our November posts. Would that The Professor and The Math Teacher could meet. That'd be a great mash-up of 21st century theory, practice and what-job-is-school-being-hired-for-re-definition in one room.

Clayton Christensen's recent talk runs about 50 minutes and it covers innovation in business as well as government and education.

It is Must-Watch TV.

No matter if you are a leader in business or government or education or not-for-profit, you will find tremendous value watching this presentation. So, FRIDAY'S POST highly recommends you treat yourself to an hour with Clayton Christensen.

How great would it be if your customers someday said The Next Big Thing you invented did exactly the job they hired it for?

--tim

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Hope and Fear and The Next Big Thing

We're at a moment when we need lots of Next Big Things. Those things and the jobs they bring aren't coming from GM or BofA or AOL or BHO. No, they'll come from us, We The People.

Trouble is hope and fear are getting in the way when it comes to getting after The Next Big Thing.

Who wants to step up and step out with some high-impact innovation when you're constantly feeding Fear the Beast with "Better not hire just yet" or "I'm not good enough" or "What if I fail" or "My boss will think this is stupid" or "You guys aren't big enough to be a good credit risk."

Oh my. Not me. That's for sure.

On the other hand, Hope unchecked can carry you quickly away. Next thing I know I'm swept up by my own genius or avarice or omnipotence.

These storylines hold the stuff of bad endings, the last thing needed when crafting a better way for, say, health care in America. How sad when Hope gives way to hype and then to the tartuffe and the thousand-page fix-it plan that becomes law of the land.

Here's the deal, Hope and Fear in proper measure can fuel each of us to The Next Big Thing. Hope dwells within inspiration coming from Something bigger than ourselves. And Fear, in the right dose, spurs positive change.

But, lordy, how do you find the right balance?

Maybe all it takes is being aware of moments when Hope and Fear are at work in our lives. And consciously responding to their movements on a path toward passion, purpose, growth.

Maybe it means balancing Hope with humility. And Fear with the trusting embrace of mystery, this thing we call Life.

You got an idea and passion for the next killer social media app, or an opportunity to buy a distressed company, or underwrite a small business loan, or desiring a career change, or looking for a new job? You're probably hanging around Hope and Fear a lot these days.

I wonder if becoming aware of how they hang around us is the first big thing we should do when getting after The Next Big Thing we do?

--tim
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Fred the Math Teacher: The Movie

FRIDAY'S POST caught up with our 2009 Teacher of the Year the other day. We wondered how the new school year was going.

In our post last June you heard about Fred the Math Teacher's out-of-the-box idea of filing daily school lessons up on the web so students can watch them at home at night and then come to school the next day to do homework during class.

A lot of people wrote in to say Fred's a really smart fellow with a brilliant idea.

Fred's picked up where he left off last school year and is now going to a new level. Turns out he's expanded his novel approach to every one of his daily classes this school year. And the results are really encouraging, when you ask the kids. Which is what Fred did in a short video piece.

Go see for yourself at Fred the Math Teacher: The Movie.

Have a great Thanksgiving. Makes me think I'll be thankful for teachers like Fred the Math Teacher this coming holiday.

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Desire. Behavior.

Game changing innovation does best when addressing our desires. Innovating or automating behavior is a dead-end route.

Google didn't set out to automate how we find information. Had it done so, it might have created robotic library card-catalogue systems. Expensive. Heavy. Yuck.

Instead, it responded to our desire for better organized information. The result is easy search innovation that's changed the world's behavior in how it finds the information it needs. And met our hopes, desires for having quick, simple access to information at our fingertips in this knowledge economy.

Medtronic didn't set out to automate the behavior of the beating human heart. Otherwise it might've invented an artificial heart device. Instead, it responded to the desire of healthy, normal living while managing cardiovascular disease. Today it produces minimally invasive devices about the size of the coins we carry in our pockets. How excellent is that!

Would that our health care reformers pay mind to this as they advance efforts to reign in out-of-control costs while improving access in an aging country.

The next big thing for business software guys isn't automating more-and-more behaviors of their customers. It's going to be meeting the desires of people to be appropriately, commercially, efficiently, measureably social and community-centric in a business context.

Twitter's had some success here. But I suspect there's more to the desires of humans being social in business than what is being met so far by Twitter.

You want to be in on the next big thing at a time when our economy needs a lot of Next Big Things, you ought to be solving for desire, instead of solving for behavior.

-tim
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Revelation

How do you greet revelation?

Mostly, I ignore it. Revelation moves in, then moves out. Mostly, it's months or years before I notice its movements.

Relevation is the subtle ingredient of awareness. Sometimes tough to hear in a noisy, media infested world. Sometimes difficult to embrace because it is so honest, so direct, so tough on illusion. Sometimes its patience lulls you to an easy place where you think you have all the time in the world to get back to it when, you know, it works best for you.

Revelation is about what's becoming, not what's been left behind. Which means its second-act is Mystery. And who really wants our play to go there from here.

Sometimes revelation breaks into life in a way that is impossible to ignore. Like when my wife called and said Those Words about our son: "He has cancer."

Sometimes it comes with a question that followed Those Words, "If it was time to take your boy, would he have cancer with a ninety-eight percent cure rate?"

Sometimes revelation hangs around long enough that you notice its greeting is all about life you cannot even imagine, like life ahead with a new spouse or partner, or with a new child. Something so good it makes you wonder, Am I worthy?

Or maybe it's telling you something's not right. Maybe its greeting is about a dead-end career or a stale relationship or a dear long-held belief or a deadly addiction. Something's dying; there's no energy; life in you or around you is draining away. Maybe you don't notice and you die or live a life without any life.

Sometimes revelation is a slow burn that creates just enough smoke and flame you can't help but notice. Maybe it's a business deal or some other hope stone that rolled off a tall cliff and you say the words my friend once said after getting swept up innocently in a good-deal-gone-real-bad, criminally-bad: "This is big trouble."

And maybe revelation pays its call and can't cut through the power and the glory and the omnipotence. As in There's No WMD Here. With Mission Accomplished the potent and powerful shrug and respond Then Glorify Elsewhere. And revelation moves on. Leaving the power and the glory and the potent in a boiling pot of cable television talking heads, moving no one, nowhere.

Revelation sometimes has two words serving up its alert: Holy Smokes or Holy Hannah or Holy Whatever-from-the Gutter.

When I hear them, revelation is nearby. It's in the house. My house. When I hear them I know the bets I placed on hope and fear, belief and unbelief, life and death are being called. Those words mean the jackpot of awareness is somewhere nearby.

But, here's the thing, maybe revelation's always been in the house.

What if it's me who moves in and out?

Maybe greeting revelation and letting it greet me means I'm finally home.

How do you greet revelation? What words call you home? Where do you go from there?

Bob the Leader

Bob the Leader has been a leader as long as I've known him. I learned this first-hand way back in ninth grade when he told me he was into reading and writing poetry.

Back in the day of our Catholic all-boys hormone hot-dish, a place our Benedictine masters had us believe was high school, guys didn't tell other guys those things unless they had the stuff to live dangerous lives of saints-in-waiting-to-be-stoned or maybe as leaders of a community of some sort some day.

Turns out Bob's now leading a community. His makes its way in the cut-throat competitive construction materials business.

They're doing well in this economy. And Bob the Leader's doing it the way he did it in ninth grade: leading with the heart of a poet; maybe as the only poet in the cut-throat construction materials business.

How's that for dangerous....

Bob the Leader's seen this kind of economy before. Last time was the early 90s. That's when Bob nailed the deal to supply and deliver the drywall for The Mall of America. And all that drywall for the Mall of America is how he and his team and maybe even America beat the recession back then.

His secret was the same in the 90s as it is now: "Old fashioned values like hard work, honesty, doing what we say we're going to do, never lose their sense of fashion, and wear smartly if you're brave enough to wear them every day."

Bob the Leader goes even deeper when he cuts to the heart of Community Centricity, "Overcoming oneself is about the struggle over the destructive ego. Selfless service is what we should offer up. Success and happiness are not the primary goal, but a byproduct of service and doing the right thing."

Hey Washington, Wall Street, Cable Wide Mouths, are you listening to this guy...?

Today to make sure they're on track, Bob the Leader leads his company regularly through real-life scenarios, testing itself to see if it is holding true to its values, its beliefs.

When he does this, Bob offers one simple thought: "Bottom line should be read last, like an epilogue to a good book."

Oh my, how that is well said. And said, I should imagine, as all men of letters in the cut-throat construction materials industry would say. Makes me wonder how great it would be if more of our companies and communities had leaders as poets.

Do you know poets with the values of Bob the Leader, leaders who are poets in your midst?

Wouldn't their values wear smartly in our communities if we were brave enough to wear them daily?

--tim
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