"Mistakes are the portals of discovery." James Joyce

"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"I'm forever raising the high bar and breaking my neck to clear it." John Kluge

Today's image: Surrealist Twist by AndyKapped. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

What's the second most misunderstood word in the business lexicon? Innovation, so says branding and marketing ace Tom Asacker. Tom's right about that and right again in declaring the most misunderstood word to be brand. We can all learn something from Tom. Here's the first part of Tom's definition of innovation...

"Innovation is the successful introduction of a new idea that results in a more desirable customer experience, and..."

Complete that sentence and get Tom's insight on this much talked about (and too often misunderstood) subject, read his latest article The Enemy of Innovation, here's the jump. Highly recommended. Bravos, Tom!

"Nothing stops technology, nothing."

That's one important lesson learned from my dear friend, mentor and former partner the legendary Larry Bentson. The company that started in the motion picture exhibition business (you may know that as the movie theater or cinema trade) got into radio when radio was to kill the movies, then into TV when TV was to kill movies and radio, then Cable when Cable TV was to be the certain death of movies, radio and broadcast TV. The day I joined the firm they still owned every one of those businesses, had for decades and everything was successful or very successful.

Our mission was to stay ahead of the curve. The daily question being...What's next? The objective at hand...keep the plates we have spinning, add new plates.

We built a video retailing chain (remember, they were going to kill theaters, TV and Cable), got serious about building a telephony-communications firm (the phone is the future!), acquired the largest teleport in North America (sat delivery would soon be king), started a software development company (computers will be ubiquitous and they'll need software), launched a leisure services company (marinas could benefit from professional management including market research) and a bunch of other stuff. The point of this story is staying current is really important. Larry used to say when people asked why he got into so many competing and varied businesses "We're basically paranoid about losing everything and like to keep the portfolio diversified. We like to get into new things early."

As the partner responsible for marketing and sales let me say it was big fun. Over a dozen learning curves. Learned a bunch but the key take away comes back to Larry's one liner "Nothing stops technology, nothing." Getting a grasp of this, a deep understanding of what's happening around you is powerful. Early indications can be very important. The guy who is living on the leading edge of TV news, no...make that the future of video journalism is Michael Rosenblum. Please, come with me, see the future here. Thank you Michael, well done.

The real story: The one you won't read anywhere else. The back story on how the Clear Channel deal came around. Heidi N. Moore has done a fine job dishing the detail via WSJ.com, check it out here. Kudos to Heidi!

Bonus: Harve Alan

More future, more often: Eric Savitz provides excellent coverage of the week's single coolest event - The Churchill Club's Top Ten Tech Trends Dinner. Here are some headlines, complete post by Eric at the jump.

• "Demographics are destiny, creating opportunity"
• "The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer"
• "Water tech will replace global warming as a priority"
• "Evolution trumps design"
• "Within five years everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse"

Read At The Churchill Club: The Top Ten Tech Trends here.

They must be stopped: Gen X vs The Millennials. Robert Lanham fires the first shot via Radar here.

Astro buzz: Flash 10

Blogs you should know about (but probably never heard of): The Industry Standard's Top 25 B-to-Z List

Congrats & cheers: Les and Quincy on CBS acquiring CNET for 1.8 billion cash. Comcast bought Plaxo, deal closed today (thanks to Michael Arrington via FriendFeed).

"People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to." George Allen

"Play the game for more than you can afford to lose...only then will you learn the game." Winston Churchill

"All the sugar was in the bottom of the cup." Julia Howe

Todays image: Last Shot in the Life of a Lens by Thomas Hawk. Awesome. Thank you!

It's that time of year when we get involved in helping clients imagine the new year just ahead. This year we are suggesting teams consider management innovation. Dr. Gary Hamel, our favorite business strategist, is writing and speaking on this very subject matter. From HBR last year (Feb 06)...

The Elements of Management Innovation

In most companies, management innovation is ad hoc and incremental. A systematic process for producing bold management breakthroughs must include

1. Commitment to a big management problem
2. Novel principles that illuminate new approaches
3. A deconstruction of management orthodoxies
4. Analogies from atypical organizations that redefine what's possible

To maximize the chances of a management breakthrough, you need to start with a problem that is both consequential and soul stirring. If you don't have such a problem in mind, here are three leading questions that will stimulate your imagination

1. First, what are the tough trade-offs that your company never seems to get right? Management innovation is often driven by the desire to transcend such trade-offs, which can appear to be irreconcilable...Your challenge is to find an opportunity to turn an "either/or" into an "and."
2. Second, what are big organizations bad at? This question should produce a long list of incompetencies...Push yourself to imagine a company can't-do that you and your colleagues could turn into a can-do.
3. Third, what are the emerging challenges the future has in store for your company?...If you scan the horizon, you're sure to see a tomorrow problem that your company should start tackling today.

Gary Hamel's new book is a must-read. The Future of Management (Amazon info)

Congrats & cheers: Dan Mason, Jennifer Donohue, Brian Thomas, Lenny Bloch, and team on a game-changing trend at WCBS-FM. Vinny Brown on a killer trend at WBLS. Drew Horowitz, Jerry Schnacke, Greg Solk and team Bonneville-Chicago on another incredible trend.

"The best fertilizer is the farmer's footsteps." Irish proverb

Developing my ppt deck for next month's Broadcast Futures Summit. Inspired by the work of the brilliant Howard Moskowitz my notion is to develop an experiment. Should you not be familiar with Dr. Moskowitz please listen to his interview via IT Conversations - Technometria: Selling Blue Elephants. Algebra of the mind is Howard's metier.

Highly recommended: Howard's new book and Howard's blog. Here's a cut from Howard's blog...

"I keep noticing something. That something is that some companies do homework, whereas other companies talk and talk, have rules, but don’t do homework. In my company’s business of creating winning messages/ideas (concepts), products and package design, doing homework means creating lots of combinations or test stimuli, not just one. Then, homework means testing these combinations among consumers, looking for what wins, and for a pattern of why winners win, and losers lose. Finally, homework means going beyond these test stimuli (concepts, products, package designs) to create newer and better stimuli based on the learning, and then re-testing to make sure that the winners is improved upon.

This strategy of ‘test – discover – reengineer – validate’ or TDRV (not easy to pronounce) wins again and again. In fact, if the testing is done with systematically varied stimuli, rather than with ‘best guess rifle shots’, then the company (or maybe you) end up knowing ‘how the world works’. The company knows exactly which messages, which product features, which package colors and shapes ‘drive acceptance’. It becomes pretty easy to create winners, and to know why they are winners. So just testing lots of stimuli puts the company way ahead, on the way to innovation."

Simply brilliant! Bravo Howard! Read this entire post here.

Check out Howard's IdeaMap venture here.

Malcom Gladwell provides a rich back story on Howard here. "The story of World's Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a man from White Plains, New York, named Howard Moskowitz. Moskowitz is sixty, short and round, with graying hair and huge gold-rimmed glasses. When he talks, he favors the Socratic monologue—a series of questions that he poses to himself, then answers, punctuated by "ahhh" and much vigorous nodding. He is a lineal descendant of the legendary eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi known as the Seer of Lublin. He keeps a parrot. At Harvard, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on psychophysics, and all the rooms on the ground floor of his food-testing and market-research business are named after famous psychophysicists. ("Have you ever heard of the name Rose Marie Pangborn? Ahhh. She was a professor at Davis. Very famous. This is the Pangborn kitchen.") Moskowitz is a man of uncommon exuberance and persuasiveness: if he had been your freshman statistics professor, you would today be a statistician."

One of Howard's gifts to us is "Rule Developing Experimentation" or RDE. The seven basic steps of RDE...

1. Identify groups or classes of features that constitute the target product.
2. Mix and match the elements according to an experimental design to create a set of prototypes.
3. Show the prototypes to consumers.
4. Analyze results.
5. Optimize.
6. Identify naturally occuring attitudinal segments of the population that show similar patterns of the utilities.
7. Apply the generated rules to create new products.
   

Photo: Only 10 meters between by Fotoliebe. Beautiful shot of QM2. Bravo & thank you!

"Passion begets success. Success begets success formula. Success formula begets isolation from passion, vision and innovation. Isolation begets atrophy, decay, a fading away." Gordon MacKenzie

MacKenzie the former creative genius in residence at Hallmark and author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball sets the table with today's quote. From the first chapter, Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?, to the final page, MacKenzie's book is a gem. It merits your attention and a place in your library. Amazon info here.

The herd instinct seems almost hard-wired especially in the media. Success begets success formula. Once a show becomes a hit the herd scrambles to follow the leader. The pacing of real innovation, resourcing any fresh development, any original approach seems relatively glacial in speed compared to the breakneck velocity associated with producing the knockoff. Corporate staff greenlights plug and play solutions on a fast track buying into the notions of first mover advantage and creative preemption. Once a new hit show appears on the radar, a trend being good enough these days, the corporate paranoia gland has been properly squeezed and the rush is on to introduce the copy. The single hit become the alpha dog that leads the pack, overnight the main attraction of the entire dog show. The buzz becomes the goods. Copy trumps original. Comfort comes in knowing some other corporate team has pulled the trigger. They must know something we don't. It's high school with money and staff provides their board and the analysts with that most adolescent of arguments "everybody's doing it."

It was ever thus. From the variety and quiz show wars of early television to "fake Drake" in sixties radio to the ongoing attempts at covering tunes (e.g., the country version of the pop hit or vice versa) and of course the remake, bringing back hits unheard by today's youth. Licensing a hit for a TV commercial can be more creative than scoring original music just ask The Iron Butterfly. While it would seem fair and reasonable to devote a share of resources to R&D, especially for properties with fair market values exceeding $150 million dollars the facts belie any such thinking. It's the cover that continues to provide cover for c-level folks. Knockoff plug and play is the perfect creative prescription for the 95% who follow the 5% who lead. The challenge is to identify and follow the true innovators, that small percent of the leading 5%, the mavericks who are creating works of sustainable value. That, dear readers, is the pesky detail.

The story of the great genius Kokichi Mikimoto provides an excellent case study. Mikimoto invented completely new competitive space, he founded Japan's cultured pearl industry. Many thought they could simply copy, knockoff his nucleation process. They had failed to fully understand and appreciate the work of this brilliant businessman and tireless promoter. The world's largest oyster, the Pinctada Maxima, is native to the waters off Australia, the famous Eighty Mile Beach area. Using Mikimoto's technique with the world's largest oyster should have produced the world's largest cultured pearls or so they thought but they failed. They failed at first because they merely copied technique expecting a better result. Bigger oysters = bigger pearls. Sometimes ideas don't travel well. Sometimes the success of the original is more dependent on the original's "environment" than may first seem apparent. A well-crafted adaptation always takes the "local environment" into account.

Earlier thoughts on creativity and radio programming here and here and here. A post with the famous Making Something Happen ad copy here. And the very popular You Can't Polish A Sneaker post here. A bounty of earlier scribbling, each post a "most emailed" by readers.

The team that had the courage to greenlight the Queen Mary 2, an $800 million dollar wager, could teach us all a lot about innovation. Innovation has risk baked into it. It's scary. You can fail. You can also hit it out of the ball park and bring home a major victory. At the least you can get on base, get into the game. As Wayne Gretzky once said "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." This week take a shot.

Another legend passes: The great broadcaster Herb Carneal has died. The voice of The Minnesota Twins for all but the first of the Twins' 46 seasons in Minnesota. I had the incredible honor and pleasure of working for him during my watch at WCCO. We shall not see nor hear the likes of this amazing gentleman again. An artiste and a class act. A major loss for broadcasting and for baseball. More here.

Bonus: The Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time. Fun! Check it out here.