Confidence = Generosity (Part 2)

“Six months into the business, we got one of those Starbucks coffee machines here in the office.  If I had realized the morale boost that would come from having a free coffee machine in the office, I would have got it Day One.  It’s almost more exciting than medical benefits.  We have one on every floor now.”

So says Darrell Cavens, co-founder and co-owner of Zulily, in a great recent piece in Inc magazine. 

Zulily is a daily deals site for moms and kids with membership of 10 million and recent valuation of $1 billion.  Early on, he learned a valuable lesson:

It’s amazing how simple it can be to make a person happy. 

In every ad agency in which I worked, there was more excitement around half-day Fridays than year-end bonuses.

Free is good. 

Never underestimate the power of generosity.

Because nothing is ever given away that isn’t somehow eventually paid back.

Like free lattes. Or free pizza.

Every one of those cups of coffee and sausage slices fuels internal human positivity, and that’s something you can’t put a price on.

Because it leads to happy brains.

Which leads to ideas being created.

Which leads to business improving.

Which leads to more free pizza and caffeine.

It’s the most productive and delicious virtuous circle in the history of the world.

Wine not?

A funny thing happened when we went to Napa Valley last week to celebrate my birthday. 

We drank some wine.

Not so unusual, you say? 

We drank wine in the airport.

Still not so unusual.  Especially for people from England and in cowboy hats, although I still can’t figure out why those two groups of people always seem to be drinking in airports.

We drank red, white, blue and green wine.  Out of aluminum bottles.  Pretty unusual, right?

The product is called Flasq.  Their packaging is red white and blue, and their product, they claim, is green; more sustainable than your average wine. 

If only their website was half as good as the average website.  But I digress.

In a world where very good wines are being sold with screw tops, decent wines are being sold for a few bucks at Trader Joes, and drinkable wines are being sold in bags and boxes, wine in innovative new aluminum flasks is a no-brainer. 

A good example of cool packaging being reason enough to try a product at least once.

How’d it taste?  Not good enough for the Cowboys and Brits to take it onboard with them, but ok good enough to tell other people about it.  And that’s about all a new brand can ask for.

When it comes to innovative thinking, when someone says “Why,” just tell them, “Wine not?”

Audacious creativity 101

Two items converged for me this week in a flash of audacious creativity.

One:  I went to see the Book of Mormon. 

Don’t see it if the sanctity of Mormonism is even remotely important to you or if you’d rather not hear the “F” word A LOT (both spoken and sung).

Do go if you want to laught your butt off at some of the most original musical material you’ll ever see.

Two:  Sears HoldingCorps. named Paul DePodesta to their Board of Directors, he of Moneyball fame (he was kind of played by Jonah Hill), assistant to the worshipper of sabermetrics and destroyer of everything holy in the old school way of building baseball teams.

Whether Mr. DePodesta can help the perpetually failing company remains to be seen.  But he's employed fresh thinking in the past to help resuscitate failing baseball teams.  

You don’t have to turn the world on it’s head or bring something outlandish to life to create something ridiculously successful.  But it sure makes it more interesting (and potentially more lucrative). The risk vs. reward ratio may a bit challenging, but man, is your potential upside massive.

And remember:  It’s actually riskier to not take a chance when you’re firm in your convictions.

Everything I needed to know about product development, I learned from a 10-year old.

Her name is Lily and her dad’s name is Joe Born.  Melissa Harris wrote about them in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend. Joe is a successful lifelong inventor, which helps explain why Lily invents things too. 

Her grandfather has Parkinson’s Disease, which causes him to frequently spill beverages.  Lily wanted to create a spillproof cup for him.

So naturally, she conducted some focus groups, developed some insights, wrote some concepts, tested them qualitatively, refined them, tested them quantitatively, refined them some more, did some BASES testing, went through several rounds with Legal and R&D, then got the go-ahead to create a model of the cup.

Actually, her process was a little more simple.

1. Assess the challenge

2. Sketch out a solution

3. Build a prototype

4. Go to your dad’s friend’s pottery studio in China to create pre-production samples

Other than the China part, it’s pretty simple, intuitive stuff.  In her dad’s words, “The is the way you should do product development.”  It led to her creation of the  Kangaroo Cup, which is basically a cup with legs.  Duh.

When it comes to product innovation, if you know what the challenge is, and have an insight around how to solve it, and have just a little bit of sketching skills (or have a friend who does), you can do a pretty good job of developing great product ideas.  Even if you don’t have a friend in China.

Of course, it isn’t always that easy in corporate America.  There’s lot more at stake than a coffee cup with legs and I’m not sure Lily would survive longer than a few hours.  That said, she still has a lot to teach us.  Primarily, that understanding a challenge can lead to a simple, desirable solution:

 An idea with legs.