The Medici Effect Blog

Launching an idea 6: The second stage

There are, as I see it, seven critical, mental, stages one has to pass through in order to launch an idea. These points are like chasms because your idea can suddenly fall into one of them – and very rarely resurge.

The first is a chasm that comes up right after you have gotten excited about an idea. Maybe you thought of it together with your friends at a bar one night, or maybe you had a sudden insight midway through a dreary getting-to-work morning shower. But, literally, less than a day later – maybe even just a few hours later, the idea is forgotten or laid to rest. Either way it soon falls into oblivion, sometimes for no good reason at all.

Now if you leap over this first chasm, let’s call it the Recall-chasm because sometimes you can’t even recall the idea you had, another stage fast approaches. This one is more reminiscent of an eddy in a river than a chasm. Here is what happens: the early excitement, in fact, does not go away. You start telling other people about the idea – you may be thinking about it before going to sleep at night– start sketching it out and explore options. This stage is characterized by google searches and brief discussions with others about the merit of the idea. Sometimes you stop talking about it, but months later return to the idea again. The key point here is that during this phase you have not, in any meaningful way, done anything about it. It’s just all talk. You swirl around like an eddy in a stream sometimes seemingly moving forward, sometimes backward, but never onto the next stage (or pool if you’re a fly fisher). And this talk can go for years because it is extremely easy to just talk about it. Tons of ideas end up in the idea-eddy and never, ever get out if it. At some point the eddy just dies out.

I was in such an idea-eddy was where when I walked out of Amabile’s office. Lots of thinking and talk, but no real trade-offs yet. But that was about to change.

Launching an Idea 5: Conversations with an expert

There is a rule from my post #4: Writing (or sketching, blogging, recording etc) your idea is critical for at least two reasons. First, we tend to forget them otherwise and, second, we are forced to flesh them out and start prototyping them. It is also a first real test as to whether you have any real interest in it and whether the idea has some type of merit. I spent a day (and soon a good week or two) fleshing out this idea before I finally could set up a meeting with Teresa Amabile – a former professor of mine at Harvard Business School.

Her work in creativity is groundbreaking and she would know if others had done similar work and who they were, I figured. I am not saying that such conversations with experts are a necessary go/no-go state for a new project of any kind. Experts are both the best and worst people to talk to about new ideas. Yes, you must absolutely do your homework, but also be wary with what you find. Some of it will not hold true for your idea or approach. At any rate, this conversation was to get to the best parts. Besides, she is a lot fun.

We met in her office and I explained the general concept of the Intersection and the explosion of idea combinations one could find there. While my hands traced outlines of intersections and idea explosions in the air between us, she looked at me with curiosity. She later told me that she was asking herself: Is this guy for real? Is he actually going to do this research and write a book about it? She leaned over her desk and spoke:

“Researching and writing a book is hard work. Do you know what you are getting yourself into?”

“Oh yeah," I said with true and clueless conviction.

“Well, then” she said and smiled, “I can tell you that your approach is quite unique – and I am curious as to what you’ll find. I recommend that you start your research with some fellows like Dean Keith Simonton, Arthur Koestler - both who would seem to support your thesis, and Howard Gardener -who may counter it.”

The meeting was over. I did not know at the time that she would, in fact, be an invaluable guide during the early stages of the book. But that would come later. Now I was psyched. My hesitancy hesitating and eagerness getting eager I left her office. It was time to get some real work done.

Launching an Idea 4: The Intersection makes its first appearance

The concept I saw before me that morning, this idea-migraine if you will, was quite visual. I saw in front of me how, by combining two different fields, the resulting number of idea combinations at the intersection of these fields should increase exponentially. This explosive area between fields immediately had a name: The Intersection.

This idea had an intense attraction. Concepts I had been thinking about over the past decade regarding risk, failures, barriers, curious fusion concepts in cooking and fashion, innovations around the world, cross-disciplinary teams, and perhaps most strongly - globalization streamed together in an instant.

And so it fulfilled the, perhaps, most important criteria for ideas to pursue: one feels attracted to them. They feel fun and intriguing. There are clearly a number of other criteria as well – but this one supersedes all of them. Over the entire day I furiously took down notes around this concept and the questions surrounding it.

• First of all – is it true? We certainly hear a lot about how combining different functions and cultures is better for creativity and innovation. But is it actually true? Is there some theoretical foundation for this?
• How do you find these intersections and how to you get there?
• What is different abut executing ideas at the intersection compared to more traditional fields?
• If this exponential increase of idea combinations that occur at intersections is real then there must one should be able to find a relationship between quantity and quality of ideas.
• And, most importantly, had this topic been done before? If so – how?

The next day I decided to seek out some advice. I decided to meet with the one person I knew could give me an immediate answer to at least some of the questions.

Launching an Idea 3: Ideas and migraine

If you want the full story of how I got the idea for the Medici Effect you will have to follow The Path series which will also be featured on this blog – it really started more than 20 years ago. This series starts on the day I finished reading The Tipping Point. It was one of those books that gave me a major epiphany. It was a great read for sure, but here’s the thing: I felt that I could have written it. Now, don’t get me wrong – Gladwell is an amazing writer, one of the very best – so I’m not saying that I thought I could write like him. But the main concept of the book, that ideas spread through social networks, that there is a critical mass to the potency of an idea etc etc was something that he both managed to infuse new thought into and provide a fresh perspective on. And he had managed to do it while keeping me very entertained! For all kinds of reasons I love both deep research and intriguing stories and here he seemed to have combined both of those concepts into something relevant. It was something I felt I could, and perhaps more importantly, wanted to do as well. So I thought about that for a good half-hour then went to sleep. When I woke up the next day a concept I had been working on for the past ten years reasserted itself in my mind, pulsating like an early morning migraine. Refusing to ease up or give me any mercy…

Launch of an Idea 2: An unnecessary book?

Writing a book about innovation could, on the face of it, seem like one of the most unnecessary endeavors on the planet– few business topics have been as thoroughly examined. In addition, writing a book on innovation without any sort of established platform, such as a column in a magazine or having been a famous chief executive or a professor at a major institution may seem useless. Because even if you are all of those things chances are that people will not react to your message – if they hear it at all. The business book market is a highly competitive place. Getting published is very difficult, finding success - virtually impossible. Besides, writing a book, it seems, takes tremendous amount of time and pain. So why do it – why write another book on innovation, especially without a platform from which to blare out its arrival?

Well, if you believe you are just writing another book on innovation (or anything else for that matter) … ehhh… besides that being a contradiction of huge proportions – stop. You have to bring something new to the table, otherwise it just not worth doing. I certainly believed I did. So the fact that hundreds of innovation books had already been published was irrelevant – none of them had looked at this particular topic from this particular perspective: thus it was necessary for someone write this one. The second issue – why even do it without a platform is … well, yeah, it is kind of foolhardy. If you don’t have a platform, the formula goes, at the very least, for God’s sake, get an article published in HBR! But I didn’t have that and so the reason why I wrote a new book on ideas (innovation seems like such a limiting word) is, perhaps, the simplest of all: I had to. The idea itself compelled me. There was, in reality, very little choice to the whole matter. Once the hit idea hit me the events that followed, I realize now, followed like 2 follows 1. So what did the proverbial first step look like?

The Launch of an Idea 1: How has The Medici Effect Done?

 

Before digging into the past five years (that was when I conceived the idea for The Medici Effect) let me quickly summarize how the book has done so far since it sets the stage for what exactly launching an idea means. Since the book hit the stand in September, 2004 it has been (in no specific order):

• Translated or is being translated into 13 languages so far: Japanese, Chinese (simple), Chinese (complex), Thai, Korean, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finish, Russian, Spanish, Estonian, and Italian (of course!)
• It has been on bestseller lists in at least three countries that I know about.
• It will soon come out as a paperback this fall. Very excited about that!
• Was named the Top-10 Best Business book of the year by Amazon.com Editor’s Pick.
• Was named #1 innovation book of the year by Manyworlds.com, InnovationTools, and other organizations and magazines around the world.
• BusinessWeek SmallBiz named it one of the Best book on Innovation quite recently.
• Has become course literature in plenty of universities and colleges around the world (including my alma mater Harvard Business School).
• The book, or myself, have appeared on at least 4 magazine covers (two in the US, one in Sweden and one in Taiwan)
• Over the past year I have spoken at conferences and a ton of Fortune 500 companies at all levels around the world (Sprint Nextel, Nike, Pepsi, General Motors, SAAB, Motorola, IBM, EDS, Unilever, JP Morgan Chase, SAAB, Pfizer, TeliaSonera, Honeywell to just name a very few).  I definietly enjoy this apsect of spreading an idea and will talk quite a bit about it.
• Over this upcoming year there will be several firms in the US and Europe that will (or already have) launch seminars and workshops  around the Medici Effect that can be licensed by corporations and organizations.
• A global education company, Celemi, has designed The Medici Game for managers and their employees allowing them to experience the Intersection in just a couple of hours.
• The Medici Effect has had a real impact in helping companies define the business case for diversity. One of the workshops launching soon focus specifically on this (DDI: Diversity Drives Innovation-the workshop).
• I am a managing director for a hedge fund, co-founded by some of the sharpest minds with an investment strategy based on The Medici Effect.
• I get emails from people around the world, several a week, talking about what the book has meant to them and there lives. It has just been fascinating hearing these stories.

This is most of it as far as I know – if you are reading this and have any other references, please email them to me. It is fair to say that the book has far exceeded my expectations. When I started my goal was, frankly, to write the best book I could and publish it. If it was any good it would set me up for the next one after that. This book could certainly have gone straight from the shelves and into a collective unconsciousness – but it didn’t happen that way.  That alone put it over the top for me in terms of result and impact – the rest has been icing. So – now that we have that out of the way… what was the process of getting an idea, writing a book, and spreading its message?