Finding meaningful uniqueness

Each brain has about 12 trillion cells and is capable of 10,000 connections — neurons forming synapses — with other cells. To jumpstart is to expedite as well as to increase such connections. Doug Hall’s Jump Start Your Brain book series helps his readers make the appropriate links and defines how to increase the probability of success for new business ideas.

Hall is considered one of “America’s top new idea men.” As one review described, “His works cover practical tactics on how to break mental constipation, walk the talk, and complete a mind dump.” The extent to which a brain can make connections is determined almost entirely by the quantity and quality of what is available to connect. In his tomes, Hall recommends various strategies and tactics on how to constantly increase the number of your “connectibles.”

Hall, a master marketing inventor at Procter & Gamble prior to founding Eureka! Ranch, a creative consultancy group, introduced a new artificial intelligence technology called “Merwyn” — a scoring system for new ideas. He explained that people can scribble their ideas and literally get a score that determines their probability of success. It benchmarked their strengths and weaknesses, and it provided expert coaching on how to increase their probability of success. Everything was grounded in data.

Merwyn is based on left-brain quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence that is the result of a six-year, $20 million development effort to discover what impacts long-term success of business ideas. The initiative identified 77 archetypes and clustered them into “The Three Laws of Marketing Physics”: overt benefit, real reason to believe, and dramatic difference, and “The Three Laws of Capitalist Creativity”: stimuli exploration, leveraging diversity, and face fears.  The “marketing physics laws” apply equally to marketing for all business endeavors, and are particularly useful knowing that customers today demand to know precisely what’s in it for them, why they should believe you will deliver, and what sets you apart from the competition. Here is my top 10 list of  â€œdoables” from Hall’s long list of recommendations.

1. Write with the characteristic Batman style — Pow: Bam! Gadzooks. Attach much greater value to enthusiasm and passion than highly structured deductive and inductive reasoning. Hall asserted that ideas “are the only true fuel for winning customers and growing profits.” How they are generated is determined by both attitude and process. With regard to scientific laws, they “provide a foundation for making decisions and taking action in the face of chaos.”

2. When you are really stuck and can’t see an answer, go back to fundamentals. You usually get stuck because you’ve tried to take a shortcut. Just go back to the fundamentals and do it by the systems. If you don’t have the fundamentals right, you can get killed. Thus, it’s always important to diligently do your homework.

3. Stimulate your brain by reading 50 magazines a month. That’s less than two a day. By doing so, you’ll start seeing the big trends that will affect your business in the future. Online titles can be included in your list. Don’t say you are too occupied, just do it.  Ask colleagues, friends or family members for suggested titles.

4. Develop delighted customers and make them stick with you. Your constant goal is to exceed expectations more than just to have happy customers. As Hall said, “When you move that number, business will come flowing in.” Retaining customers is key to building a business. Think about how much you can improve your bottom line by hanging onto your customers for longer. Think of creative ways to make them stay with you.

5. Hold routine executive lunches with 10 to 15 employees. This way the employees can get to know their company leaders and share their thoughts about the future of the company. Meeting with the executives can be one of the best ways to make your employees feel valued and cared for. Creative ideas can expectedly crop up at these meetings.

6. Form creative partnerships. It is an increasingly important way to create new ideas and markets, accelerate idea growth, and access new creative competencies. Find the right partner, and determine what form the partnership should take. Choosing your partner is critical. It will determine your future failure or success.

7. Get back to the future. “Ask yourself at the beginning of every week, ‘What can I do that will matter three years from now?’” Mark Helow, founder of The CEO Project, suggested. As a creative leader, spend your time on big-picture issues rather than working “in” the business. Value the importance of long-range creative planning. In the short run, all you can do is deal with what you have, but if you have two to three years, you have the lead time to retool. Allot time, for example, in your weekly update meetings to talk about idea planning for the future.

8. Appreciate the power — and profits — of information. Look through the inventory you have on old ideas and come up with one great “freshen-up” concept for each of them. Don’t just mine your ideas — market them, too, particularly if you have valuable ideas in your hands.  Some companies have spun off ideas businesses that have become orders of magnitude bigger than the original business.

9. Hire the right people. Southwest Airlines tests job applicants’ knowledge of the company and looks for people who are compassionate and able to laugh at themselves. At one point, the company reviewed 216,000 résumés and hired about 5,000 employees. Group interviews help speed the winnowing process and provide a more candid look at applicants than the traditional one-on-one job interview. Frequent fliers were made to participate in the group interviews believing that they knew what they were looking for in people who should join the company. And, as a piece of advice, a hiring executive declared, “It’s 10 times better to wait to hire the right person.”

10. Generate free — and fun — marketing. Set yourself apart from the competition with creative, low-budget marketing. Prominent examples include Southwest Airline’s use of an Elvis impersonator contest when it introduced service to Las Vegas, and an arm-wrestling contest between its CEO Herb Kelleher and the CEO of another aviation company with the same slogan, “Just plane smart.” Kelleher lost and the winner got to keep the slogan.

When it comes to meaningfulness, the corporate world is a little light, and you come to question what your real purpose is. Hall explained the proverbial dilemma, “If you end up at heaven’s gates, and they shake their heads and say, ‘Dude, we had a plan for you and you didn’t do it. Didn’t you listen?’ I asked myself, what is your best use, what is the thing that you can contribute to society to do something that is meaningful?”

Hall realized that he had worked at bringing the spirit of the entrepreneur to the large company, where he basically taught people how to think like a start-up, because that’s what he was. So he said, “What if I take what I’ve learned and go the other direction?” That led, after long, long years, to the book series on jumpstarting your brain and finding meaningful uniqueness.

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