At a dinner celebrating a Silicon Valley IPO in the mid-90s, one of the investment bankers rose to toast the Chief Financial Officer. Turning to the CEO, the banker said, "It's wonderful to have a visionary leading the company, but there needs to be some steak to go with the sizzle." We all need both. Brainstorming is worthless if we can't also follow through on our best ideas. Vision without focus is blurry.
Focus requires us to reduce complexity. Naturally creative people -- the ones who are already interested in everything -- often have a hard time focusing. We tackle this problem by breaking up tasks into small parts that fit into larger patterns. This kind of thinking has driven software engineering to appreciate patterns, refactoring, and other approaches to maximizing efficiency, such as "Extreme Programming" and other new techniques.
MCC Media's research includes identification of repeating patterns in communities, from brainstorming sessions to on-line discussion and Customer Relationship Management.
Keeping creativity and focus in balance is essential to innovation. Be deliberate about which one you're doing.
Market research is not a foundation for innovation. Descriptions of market segments don't tell us anything that the research subjects don't already know about themselves. Innovation calls for understanding the customer's goals, motivation, methods, resources, constraints and more.
Helping people to show and tell their own story gets us around the "I don't know what I don't know" problem.
Creation stories are powerful. We believe that every success is grounded in a great story. Read them; write them.
Executing efficiently means figuring out what doesn't work, quickly. Getting lost in a small problem means you aren't contributing to the overall goal. Try many approaches as quickly as possible, in ways that will fail fast.
Extreme Programming calls for creating a test before writing a line of code. That means that every modification can fail immediately.
Get your work in front of customers frequently. Customers with interesting points of view can have far more influence than others. Our research helps identify who they are, so that you find the most valuable feedback.
Customers set priorities. Implementors set schedules.
Wellness is essential to execution. Working hours, activities and food matter.
About MCC Media
MCC Media was created by Nick Arnett, who has been a journalist, publisher, market researcher, software product manager and strategic consultant to clients large and small.
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