BusinessBloggingBootCamp

E-Schoolers Make the Best Innovators

The cure for Blyopia will have to wait a bit longer. Parts II and III are in the works, but ...

Some readers may be aware from Yvonne's Lip-Sticking posts that we're in NYC blogging from the Fortune Innovation Forum this week (now all of you are). This first post comes to you LIVE (sort of) FROM NEW YORK -- actually, that just means I'm typing on the laptop at a table in the "play" area. So I'm going to give you just a few quick takes on the action from this morning.

The first session this morning featured Andy Stefanovich, of the creativity and innovation consultancy Play. Andy's title is "In Charge of What's Next" ... and his company set up a "play area" in which he urged us stop in and, well ... play. His advice for becoming more innovative included encouraging "slightly disruptive" thinking, being "confusion tolerant" during early thinking about solutions to problems, being ready to embrace the "unexpected in-betweens" in the process, and being both "interested and interesting."

In the next session, we listened to Gary Hamel predict the future of management, starting from his thesis that management itself is the next great opportunity for creating large returns on the investment. He gave examples and spoke of a "post-management" business world, with flat organizations (including flat compensation models), in which the consumer wields the power. I took three and a half pages of notes and cannot begin to do justice to this session here, but hope to find time to give it better treatment in a full post or two. Suffice it to say here that every session I've been in since and most of the hallway conversations I've been in or overheard have mentioned one thing or another from Gary's talk as a starting point or context for the discussions.

I'll close for now with a quick mention of the workshop session I attended on "Using Images to Think, Innovate and Drive Business," by Tom Wujec with Autodesk -- another session I can't do justice to here. In a former life (2003) I wrote some posts extolling the virtues of the wall-sized computer screens shown the the Tom Cruise movie "Minority Report" as a tool for knowledge work. Tom's company has made that vision a reality, building Visualization Studios in which teams can work with floor to ceiling digital corkboards to see, rearrange, and connect the information they need to solve problems. He described ways this kind of technology can support and drive rapid, re-iterative innovation cycles.

The title of this post refers to one of Tom's examples: he conducts creativity sessions for various groups in which small teams are given some dry spaghetti, tape, string, and a marshmallow. In 15 minutes, they are supposed to design and build a strucure to support the marshmallow. The tallest successful assembly wins.

He asked us which group generally does the worst at this challenge? His answer: recent B-school grads. Which groups do best? You guessed it: the E-schoolers (elementary school kids)!

His explanation: the kids aren't wasting any time or energy jockeying to become the CEO of their marshmallow enterprise.

With that humbling thought ... more to come!

Blogs vs. Websites vs. Ezines

And the answer is ... drumroll ...

Blogs, plus Websites and Ezines.

At least that's the conclusion we think you should draw from some of the evidence that we found in our own blog comments this morning and a debate going on at the Ezine/Blog hybrid, Ezine-Tips.

For the Blogs vs. Website contest, we'd submit both our own experience with the synergy between a blog's frequently updated content and the connection you can make to your existing Website with simple hyperlinks and/or feeding your blog headlines to your Website homepage via RSS. This morning's comment on our A-ha! blog from Boot Camp graduate Gerry Murak shows what any small business person can do by climbing the short learning curve to add a blog to their online presence. You may want to click over to read the whole comment in context, but here's the critical point:

Yvonne and Tom,
... you left out a very imortant piece - I did not believe in blogs. ... we had the book blog up in the afternoon of your Boot Camp but I saw it as one more thing to try and get done and just didn't have time for.
Two months after it was up, I was ready to bury it. Both of you provided the words of encouragement that gave me a second wind and turned me into a believer.
...
From one of your converts,
Gerry

Gerry has accomplished a lot by making his Blog and Website work together. Take a look at how we've been doing the same:

Lip-Sticking and Smart Marketing to Women Online

Knowledge Aforethought and Advocacy 2100

A-ha!: Authors helping authors and WME Books

Now, for the Blogs vs. Ezine battle, we refer you to the Ezine-Tips online newsletter, which has morphed into a semi-Ezine/semi-Blog (with dated posts and permalinks):

Arguing in favor of blogs, Why Blogs are Beating Out Ezines ... And Matter So Much to Your Platform, a post from Suzanne Falter-Barns who publishes the blog Painless Self Promotion. Taking the contrary view, Why Ezines Still Beat Blogs, from Ezine-Tips writer Christopher Knight.

Bottom line: both of them recommend using BOTH tools.

Falter-Barns: "If you're still working on building up your ezine list, I recommend you beef it up by including a blog in your offerings."

Knight: "It’s not a question about one or the other, but BOTH should be used. ... I recommend that you add a blog to your business this year."

So once again, the answer (for now) remains: (d) ALL OF THE ABOVE.

What about us??

PC Magazine's January 2005 issue (not online, oddly) selects as "People of the Year" the founders of Blogger and our own favorites Mena and Ben Trott of Six Apart, who gave us both Movable Type and TypePad.

Ben posts regularly to the blog that is Six Apart's Web site. Mena has her own business blog, Mena's Corner.

Mena's current lead post hits close to home for us, as it discusses both her speech to the GraceNet women's organization and her helping author Mary Trigiani build a blog to support her book. The blog is called Mary Trigiani, in her own voice; the book is Cooking with My Sisters : One Hundred Years of Family Recipes, from Bari to Big Stone Gap. It's great to see others using blogs to support and supplement their print publications, as Yvonne has done with Lip-Sticking.

We've been sharing that idea with authors, too, like Gerry Murak, who's using his blog to help gather submissions for his wonderful forthcoming collection, Our Fathers Who Art in Heaven.

So, we're all for recognizing the pioneers who gave us the tools. But we think PC Magazine is a couple of years behind in doing so and that this year's focus should be on the bloggers themselves, as several others have suggested (for links see Yvonne's post here). Why not designate bloggers as the collective People of the Year? To badger Time Magazine, e-mail them here.