Making Ideas Happen (2 page)

My experiences inside and outside Goldman Sachs led me to pursue my MBA at Harvard and to simultaneously found Behance, a company dedicated to organizing and empowering the creative world. While at Harvard I was able to explore productivity in the creative industries, particularly during an independent research project with Teresa Amabile, the famed expert on creativity in business and a professor at Harvard Business School. Meanwhile, I assembled a smal team of like-minded thinkers in New York City who shared my enthusiasm, curiosity, and desire to organize the creative world.

Launched in 2007, the Behance Network is an online col ective of many thousands of leading creative professionals from around the world. At al hours of the day and night, network members post their latest projects—ranging from designs for major brands, to architectural plans for buildings, to new fashion lines and photographic series—for their peers to review and for potential clients to consider. Mil ions of visitors explore these projects every month. Each project is a testament to an idea that has been pushed forward.

The Network provides organization, feedback exchange, efficient communication, and promotion to support the careers of creative professionals and boost efficiency in the talent recruitment process. As we tweak the various components of the Network, our guiding mission is to help creative people and teams organize their work, col aborate, and lead others. From the Network’s data—and many focus groups—we have gathered insights into how people with ideas gain traction and stay accountable.

Over the years, Behance has continued to research and develop methods and tools for creative leaders. We transformed the tips and insights of the Action Method into a suite of paper products and a powerful online application. In 2009, we launched The 99% Conference and online think tank as an exchange for tips and insights about the execution of ideas.

My team’s passionate pursuit is to understand why and how some people and organizations are consistently able to push ideas to fruition, while most others do so haphazardly or not at al . We have interviewed hundreds of the individuals and teams that make life interesting—leading designers, emerging technology teams, media executives, writers, serial entrepreneurs, filmmakers, and everything in between. We never ask typical questions such as “What inspires you?” or “Where do your ideas come from?” On the contrary, we focus less on the creativity and more on how these people stay productive and consistently execute their ideas.

Along the way we have met with teams at revered companies across industries, including Apple, IDEO, Disney, Google, Zappos, and Miramax, as wel as with bril iant individuals such as Stefan Sagmeister, Seth Godin, and Chris Anderson, who have, through their consistent execution of ideas, become admired thought leaders in the creative world. We learned that these teams and individuals did not arrive at success through a mysterious spark of creative genius. Rather, the people who consistently make ideas happen utilize many of the same best practices.

Specifical y, we discovered that the most productive creative individuals and teams have a lot in common when it comes to (1) organization and relentless execution, (2) engaging peers and leveraging communal forces, and (3) strategies for leading creative pursuits. While many of us spend too much energy searching for the next great idea, my research shows that we would be better served by developing the capacity to make ideas happen—a capacity that endures over time.

My hope is that the insights in this book wil provide you with a road map for building that capacity—and ultimately help more great ideas gain traction. The era upon us is fil ed with problems and opportunities that require fresh innovation like never before.

Being more efficient or cheaper is no longer enough to be competitive in a global marketplace. We need to conceive new ideas to address the problems and opportunities that surround us—and we need to defy the odds and make these ideas actual y happen.

This book was written with the creative person or team in mind—people driven by deep interests and gifted with multiple ideas on how to pursue them. But this book was not written merely for the stereotypical “artist.” John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, put it best: “I’m not for the notion of ‘artistic’ or ‘creative’

meaning making a pretty picture. Every entrepreneur I have ever met is an artist. They are al forced to become comfortable with failure. And for entrepreneurs, their canvas is their company.”

Why Most Ideas Never Happen

It is a shame that countless ideas with the potential to transform our lives—concepts for new drug discoveries, models for new businesses, inklings for musical masterpieces, sketches for iconic pieces of art—are conceived and squandered in the hands of creative geniuses every day. The ideas that move industries forward are not the result of tremendous creative insight but rather of masterful stewardship. Yes, there is a method to the madness of turning an idea into a reality—it’s just not as romantic as you thought.

The Life and Death of Ideas

Creativity is the catalyst for bril iant accomplishments, but it is also the greatest obstacle. If you examine the natural course of a new idea—from conception to execution —you’l see that nearly al new ideas die a premature death. If that seems far-fetched, just consider the ideas that you have conceived on your own but never implemented: a novel you wanted to write, a business project you wanted to launch, a restaurant you wanted to open. For most of us the list goes on and on. New ideas face an uphil battle from the moment they are conceived.

The cynics might suggest that the death of most ideas is actual y a good thing. After al , from a day-to-day perspective, society appears to thrive on conformity. The status quo is the oil in the gears of society; it keeps us al happy and healthy. Even the companies that preach innovation stil need to satisfy existing customers, meet their earnings targets, and keep the lights on. To a degree, the natural immune system that extinguishes new ideas in big companies is essential. After al , fresh ideas have the potential to take us off course; they are seldom economical (at first) and introduce tremendous risk to a finely tuned system. So it is with good reason that every new idea faces a battery of external obstacles before it even has a chance of materializing. Sadly, these obstacles don’t discriminate between good and bad ideas.

Even more powerful than the obstacles around us, however, are the obstacles within us. The most potent forces that kil off new ideas are our own limitations. Time is very limited, and with the demands of family, friends, work, and sleep, most ideas lose traction immediately. If your idea survives the honeymoon period of excitement, it may stil be forgotten because you are probably the only one who knows about it. Most ideas are born and lost in isolation.

Even if you do possess the single-minded focus necessary to pursue a particular idea, your journey forward wil be ful of battles. Whether you work alone or with a team, you wil become mired in the chal enge of staying productive, accountable, and in control. These journeys are physical y and psychological y exhausting, and the road is littered with the carcasses of half-baked ideas that were abandoned or surrendered along the way. It is a tragic truth that most new ideas, despite their quality and importance, wil never see the light of day.

Fortunately, there’s another side to this story. Across every industry and in every creative pursuit, there are some people who are consistently good at both generating and executing their ideas. This book captures how they do it.

The Creative’s Conundrum: At Odds with Our Very

Essence

The prospect of making ideas happen carries with it a special conundrum. The forces that help us be productive and execute our ideas are often at odds with the very source of our ideas: our creativity.

To get a sense of what it’s like to live governed by our creative side, look no further than Chad and Risa—two people I met early on who suffered from many of the common ailments that plague creative people.

A wel -known production head at a top film studio was in despair as he told me about Chad, one of the most gifted screenwriters he had ever met. Chad spent his days and nights writing. He’d had a few decent films, but he had written many more misses than hits and cycled through more than a few agents. Chad checked his e-mail “every week or so.” Production executives and Chad’s close friends said the same thing: Chad is tough to get in touch with and is extremely disorganized. He is unable to stay on top of his ideas, some of which have the potential to fit into various projects.

“Plot twists come and leave my mind every day,” Chad lamented to me.

As I talked to him about his struggle to stay organized, Chad grew defensive. He reminded me that he was a writer, he loved his job, and that writing was what he does best.

“Writing is chaos, and writing is my essence,” Chad proclaimed.

But then Chad admitted wondering what benefits he might realize if he got his “stuff in order.”

A new approach to organization made al the difference. Chad needed a system that would capture al of his fledgling ideas but also channel his energy toward the projects that required action. A self-proclaimed “technophobe,” Chad created a paper-based system that displayed the Action Steps for his most important projects in plain sight. He stopped living his life at the mercy of Post-it notes and trying to keep up with e-mail.

Instead, he adopted a set of principles and even a few rituals that made him focus on the actionable aspects of his most important projects without abandoning his creative process. After a ful introduction to the Action Method, you too wil start to reconsider your own approach to organization in personal and professional projects.

And now, a quick glimpse into Risa’s life. As a student of human behavior, philosophy enthusiast, and relentless thinker, Risa spent years working on a new theory about the social development of parentless children. While her ideas fil ed hundreds of pages of notes, she had yet to pul the project together when I first met her. She would only share her ideas with a few people and seldom review her own writing, always preferring to tackle something new. She didn’t care much for feedback, but she would talk for hours about the need for her work and the broad applicability of her findings. Without a doubt, Risa was an extremely passionate and talented woman.

Along the way, Risa had hopped from job to job. Her voice was reduced to shaky disappointment as she tried to make sense of the half-baked projects that had accumulated over the years. “Nothing has happened yet for me,” she admitted. Amidst a surplus of possible excuses, Risa was unable to explain exactly what was stal ing her progress. She was failing to make any of her ideas happen.

Risa was a bril iant mind left to her own devices. Without others to chal enge her ideas and hold her accountable, she was struggling. The turning point for Risa involved setting up a blog, engaging a dear friend who became a mentor, and joining a local philosophy forum where she could exchange her ideas with others on a weekly basis. Her scattered ideas became a more focused set of projects. Eventual y, Risa’s years of research resulted in a published book that received much fanfare. For Risa, the forces of community made al the difference.

Chad’s and Risa’s stories showcase some of the common struggles of the creative mind. Making ideas happen often comes down to a battle against our own essence.

Having a bril iant creative mind won’t cut it.

In this book, I wil focus on creative leaders and teams across industries that, time and time again, make their ideas happen. One such leader is Jonathan Harris. A unique hybrid of artist, intel ectual, and technologist, Harris is best described as a storytel er and Internet anthropologist. He may have graduated from Princeton, but there is nothing traditional about his career. Jonathan’s passion, as he describes it, is to pursue ideas that “begin with real y basic questions about the world” and explore “the role of stories as time capsules.”

Such a broad passion might be dismissed as typical go-nowhere creative ambition.

But Jonathan has been exceptional y productive in his creative endeavors. Before the age of twenty-eight, he launched multiple award-winning Web productions that pushed the envelope of human interaction with technology. His projects—“We Feel Fine,” a global online experiment in human emotion that al ows you to observe thousands of people expressing a common feeling at once; “Phylotaxis,” an exploration of the intersection of science and culture; and the critical y acclaimed “Whale Hunt,” a photo documentary that employed a head-mounted camera that automatical y captured photographs every few minutes during an Alaska whale-hunting trip—were al ideas that actual y happened.

Jonathan’s work has been featured on CNN and the BBC, and in
Wired
, and exhibited at Le Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In short, Jonathan is not hampered by his ceaseless flow of ideas. At a glance, his ideas might seem too lofty or avant-garde to gain traction. But they consistently defy the odds.

Jonathan gives his ideas every chance to succeed by pushing them to fruition.

“I think there are two phases,” Jonathan explained to me, “the first being the one where you are just picking up signals from the ether. [Ideas] aggregate over time and then pop out one day when you are in the shower. I think the second phase is deciding ‘Okay, I’m going to actual y pursue this given thing.’ And then once you’ve decided, it’s a different mind-set from that point forward. At least with that particular idea, because you have to become more rational and more logical, more disciplined. It’s less about receiving and it’s more about synthesizing and distil ing and then ultimately producing. And I think it’s something that a lot of creative people struggle with because maybe the former is a more pleasing way to live your life, but the latter is the only way that you actual y get anything done.”

Jonathan believes that any successful creative entity must be comfortable alternating between these two creative phases: ideation and execution. When Jonathan starts talking about his approach to projects and work flow, you immediately sense the value he places on self-discipline and simplicity. You also realize that Jonathan begins a project with serious expectations for its viability with an audience. While his work is personal y fulfil ing, its true purpose is to reach other people.