Everyday Innovation

Stanford Magazine recently published a one page snippet of collected thoughts asking (Stanford alumns and faculty).

What mistake taught you the most?

What Mistake taught you the most

There are some really great gems in here that didn't make the print addition and can only be found here. I pulled out the few that I thought were most relevant to the innovator's struggles (at least they resonated with me).

Side note: there was even an answer from Guy Kawasaki, who has a lot of great things to say for startups and runs a great blog. Unfortunately, Guy's answer was not up to his usual mojo and was pretty disappointed to see that his biggest mistake was NOT interviewing for the CEO job of Yahoo! In my book, you can't learn lessons from not doing something and Guy's mistakes sounded a whole lot like a bunch of justifications for not even trying.

Enough on that... Below are some excerpts. I saved the best for last!

Donn A. Dimichele, "74, is a senior attorney with the California Court of Appeal in Riverside. Not realizing that everyone you meet in life knows more than you do about at least one subject.

Roger V. von Oech, PhD í75, is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head. I made the mistake of falling in love with Palatino Semibold. Let me explain. When I started my company Creative Think in the late í70s, I asked a lot of different people what special ìbusiness successî tips they could pass along to me. The best advice came from my printer, who said, ìDonít fall in love with typefaces.î He reasoned that if you fall in love with a particular font, youíll want to use it everywhere even in places where itís inappropriate. I made the mistake of not listening to him. After awhile I fell in love with Palatino Semibold and used this typeface whenever I couldóeven in places where it clearly didnít belong. Soon my design lost its freshness and looked hackneyed.

I think you can generalize this advice to: ìDon't fall in love with ideas.î Because once you fall in love with a particular idea, your thinking gets locked in on that one approach and you fail to see the merits of alternatives. This is true whether the idea is a marketing strategy, a method for running focus groups, or a programming language. Indeed, every ìrightî idea eventually becomes the ìwrongî idea.

more after the jumpity jump...

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Innovation is a great buzz word because it leads to so many successful businesses and hefty profits that there tends to be the rational thought that the same principles that govern business will and do govern innovation.

An understandable but flawed assumption.

Business is a commercialization process of innovation after the innovation has happened and business success can and do fund further innovation in a nice symbiotic relationship.

However, business and innovation are very different approaches when viewed through the lens of focus.

If you are running a business, focus is crucial, an unfocused business leads to a lot of opportunities but very little follow through. If though your goal is to innovate, the key is to spread yourself thin (just like butter on a piece of bread). Confusing the two views and the roles required can create some messy situations as GigaOM recently reported on the top five Odeo scew-ups.

Last year Williams wrote a widely read, much-bookmarked post titled ìTen Rules for Web Startups.î ìBe Narrow,î he said, ìBe Tiny.î Today, he flat-out admitted ìI was working on Odeo at the time I wrote that, and I was ignoring most of those rules.î Odeo got unfocused and bloated, according to Williams.

Despite a thoughtful reflection, William's words and lessons seem to have changed his approach little. One would think that this new list would prompt William's to focus Odeo's efforts. While they fired a few middle level managers in a 14 person company (how they got too many managers at that size business is another issue) - it seems little has been done to focus Odeo. The company continues to work on a multitude of side projects, one being Twitter where the about page prominently boasts...

The Twitter office is located in San Francisco, CA in the very same location as the Odeo office because that's where Twitter was born as an interesting side project. The rest of the folks at Odeo also work on Twitter when they can.

Wait a minute... if "Odeo was trying to build too much," what is with this Twitter project?

Here we have the crux of the problem. Williams is an innovator, who due to some success is now trying to be a CEO and while he is able to rationally understand what it takes to run a business, he isn't able to let go of his innovator impulses. He is doing what he knows best and spreading the fine butter all over the place because putting it in one small area of bread taste like crap.