Making Ideas Happen (15 page)

These casual conversations with like-minded individuals serve as Roger’s breeding ground for partnerships.

Then there are the partners that you hire—people you engage to complement a specific weakness. Over the years, I have observed perpetual Dreamers who only “made it” once they hired a real Doer whose job was to serve as a partner in creative pursuits. In the world of independent creative professionals, we often cal these partners “agents.” Many of the most wel -known actors, designers, and photographers have agents—and they credit their agents with the balance and career momentum they have achieved.

While researching partnerships, I had the opportunity in 2009 to speak with the wel -

known twenty-four-year-old graphic artist Chuck Anderson, and then, separately, his business representative Erik Attkisson. If you haven’t heard of Anderson, it is likely that you have seen his work—he has been working with clients like Nike, Adidas, Microsoft, Honda, Nokia, and Vans since he was a teenager. In 2008, after a recommendation from his good friend and col eague Joshua Davis, Anderson decided to retain Attkisson’s services. Handling the bulk of new business development tasks, Attkisson fields client inquiries, manages scheduling, and thinks about Anderson’s career in the long term as wel as the day to day.

Although Anderson had previously been handling the business side of things competently enough, bringing Attkisson into the fold freed him up to focus intently on the creative side of his work. But the decision to work with someone else stil required some soul-searching. “It had been only me,” Anderson said, “exclusively me, doing my work for the last four-and-a-half years.” Ultimately, it was the appeal of scalability that made ceding some control seem sensible to Anderson. “I thought, maybe it’s time to give it a shot working with somebody else just to see how I can push things forward and take things to another level. I decided that I didn’t want to be just Chuck Anderson the freelancer for the rest of my life.”

Partners are just the first of many constituencies to consider as you develop your ideas. They don’t have to be financial partners or equal partners. Partners are there to complement your capabilities and rein in your tendencies. Once you select your key partners, you wil want to think more broadly about other individuals—and groups—to engage with your ideas.

Share Ideas Liberally

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.

—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813

The notion of “sharing ideas liberal y” defies the natural instinct to keep your ideas a secret. Yet, among the hundreds of successful creatives I’ve interviewed, a fearless approach to sharing ideas is one of the most common attributes. Why? Because having the idea is just one tiny step along the road to making that idea happen. During the journey, communal forces are instrumental in refining the very substance of the idea, holding us accountable for making it happen, building a network that wil push us to go above and beyond, providing us with valuable material and emotional support, and spreading the word to attract resources and publicity. By sharing your idea, you take the first step in creating the community that wil act as a catalyst to making it happen.

Take
Wired
magazine’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, as an example. Anderson wrote the bestsel ing book
The Long Tail
, which argues in favor of a business model that capitalizes on underserved niches (à la Amazon or Netflix), sel ing a large amount of rare (or low-demand) items in smal quantities to a widely scattered cross-section of consumers. In many ways Anderson’s theories relate to how new technologies al ow us to harness the power of the masses—and it’s a philosophy that he himself embraces.

“I don’t believe you can do anything by yourself,” Anderson explains. “Any project that’s run by a single person is basical y destined to fail. It’s going to fail because it doesn’t scale. If one of my projects can’t attract a team, I pretty much figure that there’s something wrong with it.” To il ustrate this point, Anderson uses the example of his idea to launch a blog that targeted nerdy, tech-obsessed fathers like him. Once he shared the idea on his blog, the project quickly attracted an enthusiastic constituency, and thus Geek Dads, a member of the
Wired
blog family, was born. Had the project not attracted a viable team within six weeks, Anderson says he would have shelved the idea.

Anderson uses his blog to share and “beta test” the ideas that go into his books. “My philosophy is to give al of my ideas away for free,” he explains, knowing that those ideas “wil be improved by a community that col ectively knows more than I do.” A case in point is his latest book
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
, which, like
The Long Tail
, evolved out of a feature article original y published in
Wired
. Using his blog, Anderson refined the concepts presented in the book based on feedback provided to him via comments and e-mails. In a sense anticipating his critics, an entire chapter of
Free
is “constructed around complaints or concerns or push-back,” wherein Anderson directly quotes issues raised by his readers and then responds to them. By sharing his ideas with the community, Anderson begins to build traction with an engaged audience in advance of the book release while at the same time using the col ective intel igence of his readers to hone his arguments.

In the corporate world, sharing ideas liberal y is required not only for keeping ideas alive but also for maximizing resources. Within a team—or between teams—new ideas are often realizations about how to run a business more efficiently and profitably.

During my years at Goldman Sachs, I had the opportunity to work with Steve Kerr, the firm’s chief learning officer at the time. Kerr had pioneered the research and first implementation of the “boundaryless organization” during his previous role at General Electric, leading the company’s famed Crotonvil e initiative. His notion was that removing the traditional boundaries between departments and between the organization and its customers would facilitate the exchange of ideas and best practices.

Kerr would often talk about how “hoarding information is an integrity violation,” making the case that failing to share a best practice with your team or department was essential y akin to stealing from the company. If you had an idea or some realization about how your team could work more effectively, and you failed to share it with your col eagues, Kerr would argue that you had stolen from the team. For this reason, Kerr advocated for management practices that supported broader idea sharing, stressing the wisdom of moving employees around within a given company in order to spread ideas more efficiently between teams and departments.

Within a bureaucracy, sometimes you must move people around and literal y share people to share ideas. The same case can be made for al creative endeavors: our odds of success increase when we readily share ideas and seek out discoveries that have already been made by others in our industry.

The examples set by Chris Anderson and Steve Kerr are refreshing, but they go directly against the grain of some of the most celebrated idea generators of the last era.

Steve Jobs is notorious for extreme privacy around innovation at Apple—both with the public and even between teams within the company. Students across the creative disciplines have always been advised by their professors to share ideas careful y.

Certainly, the thinking behind patents and idea protection in general holds some merit.

Given our great passion for our ideas, and the potential value of the good ones, our desire to protect them is understandable.

Nonetheless, my research indicates that sharing ideas significantly increases the odds of ideas gaining momentum and ultimately happening. Creative professionals and entrepreneurs alike claim that they become more committed to their ideas after tel ing people about them. The fact is that great ideas are plentiful, and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When your ideas are known by many, they are more likely to be refined, and you are more likely to stay focused on them.

As we saw with Chris Anderson, advances in technology are making it easier than ever before to rapidly share ideas. Technology has made dissemination easy, leading to more progress and accountability. Across industries, new platforms have enabled each of us to assemble our own networks and quickly broadcast our latest work. The prospects of sticking with a particular project and enduring the lul s of a project’s plateau become easier with encouragement from our fans or fol owers via social tools like Twitter and Facebook. The potential of these tools, of course, depends on our wil ingness to open ourselves up.

Ultimately, most ideas die in isolation because they are not shared and, as a consequence, are ultimately forgotten. You have a responsibility to become more permeable, even if it goes against your natural tendency. You should share ideas liberal y —if not for the sake of your own success, then for the sake of society. From the greater perspective, you should hope that your great ideas happen for the benefit of al —even if you choose not to execute them.

Capitalize on Feedback

As you share your ideas with others, you wil start to see whether people engage (or not) with your ideas once they’re out there. The level of engagement alone can shed new light on the value and potential flaws of your ideas. And as people engage with your ideas, they wil develop opinions about them. Ideal y, the opinions wil result in an exchange, and this exchange wil result in useful feedback.

The value of feedback is inarguable. It is a powerful, sobering force that can help refine good ideas, kil bad ones, and postpone premature ideas that are not yet ripe. But if feedback is so readily available around us—and so crucial in making ideas happen —why is there so little focus on it? Very few creative teams that we’ve met— in start-ups as wel as in established companies—place significant emphasis on promoting feedback exchange. And a lot of creative minds can barely tolerate feedback.

Feedback in the creative world is clouded by a unique conundrum that ultimately comes down to incentives. While the value of feedback is high, the incentive to give feedback to others is low—and the actual desire to hear it is often nonexistent. After al , the work you do to pursue your ideas is a labor of love. The last thing anyone wants is to hear harsh truths about a loved one.

However, the more enamored we are with an idea, the more we need this reality check. Despite the uncomfortable friction that feedback may cause, we benefit when we are able to tolerate it. Those who are best able to seek and incorporate feedback see it as an asset and, in some ways, a form of nonfinancial compensation. At the end of a project, they wil request feedback from others. Simple questions like “How did that go?”

or “Is there anything I said that didn’t make sense—or that you would have done differently?” can prompt an exchange yielding valuable insights. It can soften the terrain for feedback exchange in the future as wel .

As a freelancer or a manager of a large team, you can develop methods for consistently gathering and exchanging feedback. One best practice for smal high-performing teams was taught to me by Steffen Landauer, vice president of leadership development at Hewlett-Packard. Steffen encourages leaders to send an e-mail to each person on their team—as wel as to key clients—requesting a few feedback points for each participant under the headings START, STOP, and CONTINUE.

Each recipient is asked to share a few things that each of their col eagues and clients should START, STOP, and CONTINUE doing. People then return their lists to the team’s leader (except for the feedback about the leader, which is redirected to someone else on the team). The points under each heading are aggregated to identify the larger trends: what are most people suggesting that Scott START doing, STOP doing, and CONTINUE doing? Isolated points mentioned by only one person are discarded and the common themes are then shared in a personal meeting with each member of the team.

I have seen this methodology for rapid feedback exchange (and variations on it) work quite wel in smal teams across industries. Feedback exchange needs to be simple and action-oriented. The START/STOP/CONTINUE methodology in particular is action-oriented and quick enough to employ multiple times per year.

Mechanisms like the START/STOP/CONTINUE approach can be adapted for any project. They not only serve to gather intel igence in the course of making ideas happen but also send a message to your community of col aborators and clients. The message suggests that you are open to feedback, that you are constantly improving, and that you are actively learning.

Some people we came across went as far as suggesting that feedback exchange is a powerful form of self-marketing and can cause a metamorphosis in the project itself.

Noah Brier, the head of planning and strategy at the Barbarian Group, a leading boutique advertising and digital agency in New York City, is a good example.

Among the advertising and digital media elite, Brier is known as a successful strategist behind powerful brands such as Red Bul , Panasonic, and CNN, among others. However, in the larger technology and marketing community, Brier is respected for his continued microinnovations. Whether it is a site cal ed Brand Tags that aggregates brand attributes from mil ions of people, or a weekly morning gathering of creatives that has become the international phenomenon known as “Likemind,” Brier has consistently conceived and executed bold ideas.

According to Brier, feedback played a key role in both honing and expanding these two projects: “For both of them I was quite involved and spent a lot of time emailing every single person who asked a question. I think that personal contact and feedback [are] quite important. Being involved on that level al ows me to get to know the people who are coming to Likemind and using Brand Tags, and helps me come up with new ideas for ways to expand.”