Try It. Tweak It. Use It. Share It. Volume 7
From fifty-nine productions Apollo 50 Go For The Moon event, Washington DC, July 2019
By Mary Aviles
Remembered to fall back? Check. Reviewed ballot for Tuesday? Check. Apologies for the slight delay in posting this one. Whose idea was it to put Halloween on a Wednesday. We still haven't recovered...
Try It.
I don't know about you, but I have a seemingly-infinite list of business books on my Reading Bucket List. I often order them and I can't make it past chapter one. (Which is why Blinklist is so helpful.) Talk Triggers by Jay Baer & Daniel Lemin is a complete departure from this phenomenon. It was very digestible, immediately applicable, and I finished the entire thing!!! Additionally, their website has several hugely useful resources available for download and there's even a Facebook group you can join if you'd like peer-to-peer interaction regarding your organization's word-of-mouth marketing. One of my favorite topics was the "because" statement as it so succinctly ties the strategy and the operations together:
We do [TALK TRIGGER] because [REASON].
(E.g., "Five Guys gives more fries because it wants customers to feel like they got something extra.")
Tweak It.
I've returned to this article on Retail's Innovation Problem over and over again for clients both in and out of the retail industry. Key takeaways:
The difference between iteration and innovation or disruption
"The tendency by incumbents to measure their success relative to competitors within their same vertical creates gaping blind spots that leave the door open to disruptors."
The connection between innovation and uncertainty
The importance in screening talent for creativity
The speed with which innovation happens ("Consider that the time between the Wright brother's inaugural flight at Kitty Hawk and the Apollo 11 moon landing was a mere sixty-six years." I had the EXACT same thought the last time I was at Greenfield Village.)
Use It.
Diversity has been a recurring theme in my recent project work. This Fast Company piece examines the tangible advantages of experience that come with age, but also the persistence of ageism in the workplace. And, in this Nevertheless podcast episode, they focus on this perhaps less obvious type of diversity, that of experience.
“the importance of having cultures of learning and innovation, cultures where everybody is considered to be playing a role in the process of innovation and everybody should be looking to find ways to up-skill and improve what they know so they can support the innovation process...Every nurse there knew about the evidence and the research that underpinned why they were doing things in the way that they were. And critically, this notion of the diverse team — there were so many different countries, so many different nationalities, represented there, so many different sets of experiences of different neonatal intensive care units that all of these teams had worked in. From New Zealand to the Philippines to parts of America and Australia, it was just an incredibly diverse and multicultural environment and that diversity and that range of experiences was again something that was quite unique. It brought a very special perspective and a very outcomes perspective that you could take all these people from different cultures and very different experiences but together their view about how to improve the chances for these babies was just phenomenal."
Share It.
One of my closest friends, a leader in experiential learning, shared this resource with me. She uses it with students in her classroom. I have found it to be a valuable marketing research resource, especially at the beginning of a project. It can be extremely difficult to craft a research questionnaire, but this step-by-step process (draft, categorize, evaluate, prioritize, consider usage, and reflect) is a fantastic way to start.
I hope you're having a productive Autumn. Happy Turkey Day in advance. As ever, if you implement one of the ideas you found here, I'd be thrilled if you reported back your outcomes!