Innovation on the 101 Freeway

Okay, so where am I?

Well if it were just ten years ago, I would be waiting in line to buy my Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens movie ticket that comes out three months from now. The Internet made it so I could skip

Hollywood lines for the 1977 opening of the original Star Wars.

the lines and buy my tickets at a Los Angeles ArcLight Cinemas theater, in my car, on the traffic-snarled 101 freeway. Even then it wasn't easy as I searched fifteen different shows trying to find an assigned seat not in the first two rows. Mission was accomplished during my 52 minute commute.

Ticket sales were so brisk that it literally broke the internet (or parts of it). The Star Wars trailer is to the Internet what the Death Star is to Alderaan, crashing Fandango and Movietickets.com shortly after tickets were released. A couple of days ago, Imax reported $6.5 million in U.S. and Canadian advance ticket sales. This absolutely crushes box office numbers set by other highly anticipated hit films. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Avengers all raked in about $1 million each in similar sales.

Call me a nerd or a dork or whatever. Opening day for the seventh installment of Star Wars is an epic event (barely surpassing my South Korean movie opening [ha!]).

I'll be there opening day. And why wouldn't I? I mean listen to Han Solo (around the 1:11 mark) and the chills start in your ankles and climb up to your neck:

"It's true.

All of it.

The dark side.

The Jedi.

They're real."

All this Star Wars talk and Internet breakage got me wondering about innovation. Innovation for the your life. Innovation for the workplace. Innovation from your staff. Getting your people to contribute more to your organization while simultaneously establishing stronger talent retention must cost a pretty penny, right? Not really, says corporate coach Maxine Attong.

Want to know more? Buy the book!

“You don’t necessarily need to add expensive new ingredients to the stew, you just have to know how to use your ingredients better,” she says. “A talented chef – or in this case, corporate or organizational leader – knows how to let an ingredient speak for itself, perhaps with just a touch of seasoning, or guidance.”

What is the guidance – competition or incentives such as bonuses? Not exactly.

“Most employees want to have more input,” says Attong, a certified facilitator and author of Lead Your Team to Win: Achieve Optimal Performance By Providing A Safe Space For Employees. “However, personal issues, fear of being laughed at or anxiety of not getting credit can stymie contributions from a leader’s staff.”

If a leader can engender a real sense of trust, the organization will benefit both from the individual and the team’s ingenuity. A reliable way of establishing a trusting climate is to make team members feel safe, says Attong, who offers five steps for doing so.

• Share responsibility; practice “I” statements: With openness, encourage interaction by having team members and leaders enforce the rules and monitor the use of common space. When members break the rules, the team discusses the problems and decides on the sanctions and steps necessary to assist the member in following the rules next time. Speakers are discouraged from using the word “you.” Instead, they use “I.” This simple yet effective practice encourages personal culpability and discourages blame.
• Consistency: Teams need to consistently follow the agreed-upon rules as they set the boundaries and the tone for relationships. Following the rules makes the behavior in the space predictable, which limits uncertainty and increases feelings of safety. Consistent application of the rules helps the team to increase trust as behavior becomes prescriptive and members know more or less what will happen in the room and how they will be treated.
• Judgment: The members must feel that they are not being judged. If someone says that an idea is bad, the speaker will shut down and feel embarrassed. In the future that speaker will hesitate to give ideas, since he feels his ideas may not be good enough for the team. Less confident team members may refrain from presenting ideas if they are uncertain of the quality of the ideas. However, many ideas that may seem strange or unorthodox at first can wind up being some of the best.
• Good intentions: Not all team members are effective communicators so it may be difficult for some people to frame and cogently express their thoughts.

“I assume all team members have good intentions and want a positive outcome,” Attong says. “Even though what I am hearing may be contrary to that assumption, I hold on to the thought so that I am able to fully understand what the member is saying before I react.”

When listening this way, the leader delays having a reaction and has time to assess the situation before responding. When the leader has emotionally detached from the situation, he can then ask questions to clarify the situation.

• Norming: By this point, team members seem to embrace each other and there is a spirit of togetherness. Do not be fooled by this. This doesn’t mean that your team has normed—that each team member makes decisions that advance the goals of the team. It means that the safe space concept has allowed them to see each other in a more neutral light and accept each other’s strengths and weaknesses. While the space may act as an accelerator or catalyst for the team to norm, it is not magic. It does not mean that whatever problems existed within the team before have miraculously disappeared. The leader still needs to pay attention and check the team temperature. Regular team meetings and team building sessions should still be conducted.

Want your own Star Wars? Buy the book!

Other things I discovered this week...

The death and life of the great British pub

Across the country, pubs are being shuttered at an alarming rate – scooped up by developers and ransacked for profit – changing the face of neighborhoods and turning our beloved locals into estate agents, betting shops, and luxury flats. This is the story of how one pub fought back.

What It’s Like to Vacation in North Korea? Look no further:

THE MANAGERS HAVE BEEN ZAPPED

The New Republic goes inside a radical experiment at Zappos, in Las Vegas, to end the office workplace as we know it.

AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER

Do You Know What Your Marketing Is Doing? | Adobe Marketing Cloud

What better way to celebrate the success of The Martian than an with the ultimate brand fail set around a space launch commercial?

The brand represented in the "Do You Know What Your Marketing Is Doing?" spot by Adobe Marketing Cloud and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners is AstroBoost, an energy drink you've never heard of. The spot brilliantly showcases that advertising doesn't have to be rocket science. Take a peak:

NSFW: Personal Brand

If Esquire says you are, you can bet that it's true.

While Playboy scraped the bottom of the marketing barrel to find a way to be even less relevant, Esquire magazine named Emilia Clarke the "Sexiest Woman Alive", because, well, you know, the Internet is fueled by nudity and hints of nudity and fake nudity.

You know what has a whole lot of nudity?

Game of Thrones. 

It’s the entire point of the show. On that note, it's probably worth noting that Khaleesi no longer does nude scenes, instead handing the reins over to her almost twenty year old body double.

Yet I digress and I'm only a paragraph into this thing and I haven't had my 4p hash browns from the new all-day breakfast menu at McDonald's.

Okay, so where am I?

Before I get to where I am, I have to tell you that I am pretty relieved that I am not a narcissist; this according to Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., a psychologist and the author of "The Narcissist You Know." He reports that common traits of narcissism include constantly feeling under appreciated, thinking everyone else is stupid, and feeling justified in acting mean to people.

If they only still had a McDanish!

But there's one key trait that distinguishes narcissists from everyone else: an absence of interest in other people and the inability to feel for them.

So if you're already disinterested with my ramblings, perhaps you have a bunch of narcissism running through your veins.

OKAY, ENOUGH WITH THE DIGRESSIONS.

So, I was in Austin, Texas at the American Marketing Association where the highlight of the conference was the amazing presentation by Guy Kawasaki outlining his ten tips for innovative marketing and soon you'll see why I brought up Playboy, Game of Thrones and McDonald's.

Turn on the television, pick up a newspaper or visit the Internet and you will be inundated with messages about brand products.

Tide is a brand. Pepsi is a brand. Nike is a brand.

And so are you – or at least you should be.

Speak with Marsha Friedman, a public relations expert with 25 years’ experience developing publicity strategies for celebrities, corporations and media newcomers alike, and she will tell you, "If you open a dictionary, the word 'brand' is defined as a type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name. These days you need to be that product. Keeping your personal brand alive is a must for success in today’s marketplace."

Personal branding has gotten a lot more buzz in recent times and has become an important tool for everyone who wants to improve their career or business opportunities. Touting the need for personal branding is the essence of her new book, Celebritize Yourself. (Fifteen smacks on Amazon.)

When you think about it, though, personal branding is not new. It’s just that more people have the means to do it today and, fortunately, the Internet has provided us with numerous ways to create and maintain a personal brand.

The former king of personal branding

But many entertainers and athletes thrived at it long ago. Many of us remember the song “Happy Trails” from our childhood.  Roy Rogers was the movie and TV cowboy who made this song popular and whose name and image appeared on toy holsters, lunch boxes, comic books, puzzles, coloring books and other merchandise in the 1940s and 1950s.

Roy is a great example of someone who was ahead of his time with personal branding although he stumbled into it unintentionally. The story goes, he wanted a raise from his movie studio, but the boss balked. Bummed out by the response, Roy asked for what he considered a consolation prize – all rights to his name and likeness.

As it turned out, that was no consolation prize. Roy soon figured out that he – not the studio – was the big winner in the negotiations. Any raise would have been paltry next to the money he raked in from Roy Rogers brand merchandise.

Here’s an additional lesson about personal branding that Roy Rogers provides us. Younger people don't know who Roy Rogers is today. When you mention his name you typically get a puzzled expression. Even the best personal branding, you see, doesn’t last forever. It has to be nurtured continually. (Roy, of course, nurtured his brand his entire life, and it was only the passage of time after his death that caused it to fade, so we’ll give him a break.) I mean even the greatest Christmas movie of all time, Die Hard, had a special tribute to the great cowboy:

The rest of us get no break and the message is clear: Don’t rest on your laurels, or in your saddle, whichever is appropriate.

So what can you do to get your personal brand launched and keep it alive? Here are a few suggestions.

•  Make sure your website represents you exactly the way you want to be seen. This is one of the best places to control your image. That could mean you want to be viewed as witty, intellectual or physically fit. It could mean you want the world to see you as an expert in a particular field. Maybe you want to convey an image of trust. Roy Rogers was the clean-cut hero wearing a smile and a cowboy hat. What’s your image?

• •Maintain a strong social media presence. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites are invaluable tools for networking or getting your message out quickly under your personal brand. Also, make sure you have a unified message that weaves through your website, your social media sites and anything else you use to promote yourself. Design elements should be consistent from one platform to the next as well.
• Keep your presence alive in traditional media, too, making yourself available for interviews. Media appearances act as a third-party endorsement, casting you as an authority in your field. This also needs constant cultivation. If you were quoted in a newspaper article last year, then you’re last year’s news. Even worse, if your competitor is quoted in an article today, they’ve become more relevant than you and are winning the personal-branding war.
• Branding yourself is not a one-shot deal. One of the biggest misconceptions about branding is that people expect to do one or two things to promote themselves and then figure they are done. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your branding effort never stops. It’s like trying to become physically fit. You don’t go to the gym for one week to get your dream body – nor would you expect that a good workout three years ago would leave you set for life. Your personal branding effort is the same way. It’s ongoing.

The bottom line is that creating a personal brand is one of the keys to success in today’s world. By branding yourself – making sure the world knows who you are and the expertise you have to offer – you not only set yourself apart from your competitors but you also open the door to new opportunities.

AD OF THE WEEK/MONTH/WHATEVER

Bonds Underwear

The new Bonds Underwear ad has balls! Talking ball where the family jewels banter about life down under. Their lives are improved dramatically with the arrival of a new pair of undies: