Book: IdeaFlow

McKinsey did an article with an author about his book IdeaFlow. The book is about how does one (or a company) go about being innovative, generating game changing ideas or products? I haven’t bought the book but boy, do I want it.

The author delineates his beliefs about generating ideas that might sound counterintuitive, but they really resonate with me because those are thoughts I have had.

For one thing, you have to be constantly generating ideas, good, bad and indifferent. According to the author, most people seem to think you need to generate about 20 but research indicates it’s more like 2000 ideas. We’re vastly underestimating the number of ideas we have to generate to hit upon a truly successful one. I didn’t realize it was that much.

I did figure that one has to generate, explore and try a lot of ideas but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the effort.

As an addendum to constantly generating ideas, most of those 2000 ideas are crummy, or “dopey” as Steve Jobs would put it. In other words, you have to suffer through a lot of bad ideas or failures before you hit upon a winner.

I have to hold that thought in my mind because I do generate a lot of ideas, I think relative to my peers, and most of them don’t work out. I just have to keep generating ideas and learn from my “failures”.

The second idea that resonates with me is that being innovate (or being creative) is a continuous thing, not a one and done event like a hacker event or a sprint. It’s a continuous daily effort to be creative or innovative, even if it’s so incredibly small that it’s practically invisible.

One must schedule the creative activity. The author gave an example of Jeff Bezos (who I’m not a fan of) setting aside two days a week as “no meetings” day. I think he reserved those days for thinking and maybe exploring.

That is so counterintuitive to the productivity tools that managers are deploying for their remote workers. The idea of being productive through keystrokes or through butt in the seats will hinder creativity, the real factor in business success. Yes, productivity is part of it but in times of change and uncertainty, creativity and innovation will push the company out to the forefront.

The butt in the seat or keystroke counting will not lead to innovation.

Along with setting aside time for creative thinking, one needs to explore and gather inputs. Again, that idea resonates with me because I kind of deployed that. Each week on Fridays, I would do my exploration of my ideas or search for ideas for the whole day to see what I could come up with. Fridays were my happy days. Sometimes when I was on a streak, the whole week would be my development of my idea. My biggest successes came out of those Fridays, not during those regular work weeks.

More and more, I want to get that book. I think it’s offering a lot.