Making Ideas Happen (20 page)

When you conceive new ideas and execute them, you must assume a pragmatic lens that grounds your expectations, tastes, and perceptions. Don’t confine yourself to one very comfortable spot along the frequency spectrum as you seek to share your ideas and get feedback. The most productive creative professionals and teams in the world have found strategies to cross the chasm.

One best practice is to ground every creative process with diversity. Engaging a few cynical, risk-averse advisers or members of a team wil add a valuable chemistry to the creative process that may reduce “idea intoxication.” You need to work with people who ask the difficult, practical questions that are frustrating but important when pushing ideas forward.

I have met others along the way who take an “ask your mom” approach. I don’t want to suggest that your mom isn’t with it, but pol ing an aloof or disconnected audience can be a bracing way to gauge your idea’s potential traction. Does the average person see what you see? Can the average person understand the value proposition that you are offering with your new idea?

Yet another best practice is to preserve a week of skepticism between an idea and the decision to take action. With a pause between ideation and action, the energy in a creative process wil either die or thrive. Of course, if you jump on an idea right away, you may capture energy that would otherwise disappear as an idea matures. But in such cases, creative teams often pursue half-baked ideas that may yield poor outcomes.

Instead, create a sacred space for an idea to stand the test of time. After a week, you may realize that your idea has no legs. Such realizations wil save you precious energy and help your other projects get the attention they deserve.

Recognize When You Are No Longer a Solo

Show

As you seek to engage others in your endeavors, you’l need to overcome the default mode of self-reliance that is so common among creative people. Many entrepreneurs and other creatives fondly recal a childhood in which, amidst overbearing siblings or other family chal enges, they would largely entertain themselves, working on creative projects in isolation. This self-reliance may have fostered their creativity, but it became a hindrance when it was time to scale, engage partners, and build a team.

Self-starters are often successful doing everything themselves. However, when forced to grow beyond the one-person show, many creative people struggle to make the leap from a solo success to a successful col aboration.

The transition from running with your own ideas to working with a creative team can be painful. The skil s needed to lead your self (primarily self-reliance) are quite different from the skil s required to lead others. Once the best candidate for every task, you can become a victim of your own talents as you are forced to delegate, share ownership, and “let things go.”

The first symptom of an inability to scale is finding yourself doing things that can be done by others (although, admittedly not quite as wel ). Yes, it is always ideal when the head designer, the company founder, or the architect with her or his name on the door can deal directly with any inquiry. However, in taking on such a task, the leader is not doing the things that only he/she can do. Leaders of any creative endeavor should focus first on the things that
only they
can do—things that simply couldn’t be delegated to others.

As the founder or originator of a creative pursuit, you may find yourself acting and thinking as the sole owner despite the presence of your team. But if you fail to share ownership, you’l also fail to get those around you to care. This is not about money; it’s about mentality. Having only one person stay up at night thinking about how to solve a problem or capitalize on a particular opportunity is frankly not enough. You need to engage your team as owners by sharing credit, sharing responsibility, and sharing financial rewards.

Another common problem faced by once-solo leaders is the desire to have your team just get the job done rather than learn how to do the job better. Remember, however, that the people who work for you are likely interested in more than money; they want to become experts. Besides being the leader, you need to be a teacher. You wil want to find opportunities to engage your team members in whatever interests them, even if it is beyond the scope of their jobs.

No great creative project can thrive (or even survive) off the energy of one person. You must evolve along with the scope of your creative ideas in order to make them happen.

LEADERSHIP CAPABILITY

WE HAVE NOW
covered the mechanics of organization and execution as wel as the important role that community plays in making ideas happen. But in the end, the quality and scalability of your creative endeavors rely on your capacity to lead. Your ideas wil thrive only if you manage them as a leader rather than as an independent creative visionary.

There is a great void of leadership in the creative world. Creative projects run amok and teams break down al the time as a result of misaligned incentives, poor team chemistry, and inconsistent management. Of course, many of the obstacles that arise when we must lead a team come from our natural tendencies. We fal short of ful y empowering others because we don’t want to compromise the quality (or control) of our ideas. We struggle to engage the right people and exercise sound judgment amidst the anxiety and emotion that we face when chal enging the status quo. When we fail, we often miss the precious opportunity to seize the lessons and build our capacity.

Leadership development is experiential. Through trial and error, good times and bad, we gradual y become better leaders—but only if we are self-aware enough to notice when and why we falter. In this section of the book, I present best practices of great creative leaders as points of reference for your own personal journey. While leadership capacity is only enhanced through raw experience, we must always question our assumptions and compare various methods and convictions to our own.

We wil start by examining the system of rewards that govern creative pursuits. Long-term vision is not enough. As we find ways to keep ourselves motivated, we wil be able to do the same for others—as evidenced by a number of prominent entrepreneurs and leaders such as Ji Lee, creative director at Google. We wil then discuss the unique chemistry of creative pursuits and how leaders like Diego Rodriguez, senior partner at design consultancy IDEO, build and maintain productive teams. And final y, after much discussion on how we lead others, we wil turn our focus inward. After al , some of the greatest obstacles we face in leadership lurk within us. The fortitude to learn from our experiences and take risks is a result of a very personal sense of self-awareness. As we seek to effectively lead others, we must become more effective leaders of ourselves.

THE REWARDS OVERHAUL

WE ALL HAVE
visions for the future, and most of us would argue that our daily efforts are al in service of a passionate long-term pursuit. But in reality, how we spend our energy is greatly influenced by the short-term reward systems that permeate our lives.

For most of us, the ideas we capture, the knowledge we choose to master, and the tasks we complete are heavily influenced by the demands of those around us—as wel as our own thirst for swift gratification.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said that you must “make yourself become who you are.” So it is with creative visionaries and the ability to make ideas happen. The drive to pursue long-term creative goals goes against the grain of the comfortable trickling stream of short-term rewards that are meant to sustain us and maintain the status quo. To push our ideas to fruition—time and time again—we must find ways to overpower our basic tendencies and nearsighted motivations.

Short-Circuiting the Rewards System

From a very early age, our formal education ingrains a short-term rewards system that hampers our ability to make ideas happen. We studied for tests in elementary school in the hope of getting an “A.” A good grade would garner respect from our teachers and approval from our parents. Once a graded test was returned, there was seldom an incentive to review incorrect answers. After al , a new chapter had already started and another test—with another grade—was looming. We became strategic—sure to spend our energy only studying what we knew would be tested—with the short-term goal of getting a better grade.

As we entered the workforce, the good grade became the paycheck, the recognition, and the potential for a raise or bonus. When a project is handed to us with a clear objective and a clear payoff, it is easy to economize our energy. The rewards system of the traditional workplace keeps us on track, in line with deadlines from the higher-ups. If we adhere to it, the deeply embedded reward system of our adult lives is likely to keep us employed and secure within the status quo.

However, these tendencies become destructive as soon as we begin to pursue long-term goals or attempt something extraordinary. Mustering the stamina to pursue bold ideas against al odds—and building a system of incremental rewards to make this possible—is an exceedingly chal enging task. Regardless of how spectacular our ideas may be, short-term rewards—our desire to keep our job, get recognition, or garner a raise—are constantly nagging us, vying for our attention and enticing us to channel our energy elsewhere.

As humans, we are motivated by novelty. This is what makes the honeymoon stage of any new idea the easy part. When our vision is fresh and new, we happily shun other concerns and commit ourselves to deeply contemplating a new idea. But when execution appears on the horizon—and the harsh realities of actual y making ideas happen emerge—the novelty wears off and our commitment to the long-term vision quickly fades. Without any incremental rewards to keep us on track, we begin to question our progress and the potential for success.

To successful y lead your team (and yourself) through bold creative projects, you must find ways to re-engineer your reliance on traditional reward systems. Rather than fight your natural inclinations, you must short-circuit your focus on the short term. To accomplish this you must hold two competing concepts in mind at once:
Unplug from the traditional rewards system.
As you shift your focus away from short-term rewards, you must be wil ing to go without “success” in the eyes of others. You must embrace a different set of values that may feel uncomfortable to you and may even appear rash or unwise to others. Some entrepreneurs I’ve met claim to gain confidence when traditional investors doubt their ideas. Such doubts boost their confidence that they are, in fact, innovating rather than simply replicating something commonplace.

While it can be psychological y and financial y difficult to depart from the race toward conventional rewards after a lifetime working with one mind-set, doing so is imperative to succeeding in the long term. Otherwise, you wil struggle to sustain your long-term projects amidst the desire to be validated in the near term.

Stay engaged by setting up a system of incremental rewards.
While it would be nice to believe that you can stay motivated to go against the grain based on wil power alone, you’l likely need an extra push. To achieve the sustained effort required to pursue spectacular achievements, you must trick yourself into staying engaged. If you cannot completely overcome your obsession with short-term rewards, you must use it to your advantage by establishing a regimented series of near-term rewards—the psychological equivalent of grades, paychecks, and affirmations. Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference. One entrepreneur I interviewed cited the growing number of results from a Google search for his company’s name as a daily reward that his company sought for short-term encouragement. You must be creative in developing a set of incremental rewards that represent progress in long-term pursuits.

You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ingrained short-term reward system within you. But you can become aware of what real y motivates you and then tweak your incentives to sustain your long-term pursuits. We’l examine some ways to mine alternative forms of compensation in the next few sections.

Happiness is its own reward.
If you use the Internet and you wear shoes, chances are you’ve heard of Zappos.com. Zappos was founded in the dot-com heyday and has grown into the largest online shoe store. The company places a near-fanatical emphasis on service. Its success is largely attributed to its corporate culture, a facet of the company that earned it the twenty-third spot on
Fortune
’s 2009 list of “100 Best Companies to Work For.”

“Powered by Service” is the Zappos motto, and when I visited the company’s offices in Las Vegas, Nevada, my tour guide made the company’s commitment clear. “Our product is customer service,” he proclaimed. “We are a service company that happens to be sel ing shoes. Our next product could be anything . . . perhaps even an airline.”

For a business that puts customer service at the center of its mission, the commitment and contentment of its employees is extremely important—and employee morale at Zappos is legendary. I was struck by the expression of company spirit as my tour guide led me through the company’s cavernous hal ways. Every department offered a custom greeting as we passed. The “Kids’ Shoes” team shook their pompoms. The “Clothing”

department rang cowbel s. The “Company Coach,” Vik, took a photo of me wearing a crown and placed it on the VIP wal —reserved for everyone who comes to visit Zappos.

Because, Vik explained, “at a company al about service, everyone is a VIP.”

The CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, also serves as the company’s cultural attaché, with a steady stream of speaking engagements, blog posts, and Twitter commentary. Hsieh believes wholeheartedly in the value of happiness as the backbone of a service-based business. Happiness, it seems, can even serve as an alternate form of compensation.