Three words that will slowly kill your business
Max Farrell is the co-founder of Create Reason, an innovation experience firm that instills a culture of intrapreneurship inside established companies.
There are three words that will slowly kill your company.
“That won’t work.”
It’s a phrase we use daily in our offices and interactions with one another to quickly kill ideas.
Why do we do this?
•Because killing ideas is free.
•Because we have a fear of failure, as familiarity almost always wins out over exploring change.
•Because there is a fear of the new. We have a natural tendency to create safe routes before we ever explore the road less traveled.
But we’re still standing right?!
Yes, some of us.
Remember Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders?
They all said “that won’t work.”
Kodak didn’t embrace the digital revolution, believing printing photos was still what the customer would always prefer. The digital camera and infrastructure came in and crushed Kodak.
Blockbuster laughed off the notion that people would “stream DVDS”. Netflix started a streaming revolution with every other entertainment company forever playing catch up. Last I heard of Blockbuster, they had a few stores left in Mexico.
Borders routed their online sales directly through Amazon and then completely ignored the e-reader revolution. So when their arsenal of stores, CDs, books and DVDs didn’t sell, they had no choice but to shut down shop.
In each of these, billions of dollars were lost and tens of thousands of jobs disappeared.
Companies bet their fortune that customers would keep doing the same things. Customers evolve and never “always” do anything.
So how can you avoid a painful crumbling of the company?
There are two, two word statements you must use:
“Yes, and...” and “Yes, if...”
“Yes, and…” comes from the improv comedy world. To keep the momentum going, actors on stage will say “yes, and…” when someone says something. The moment another actor says no, it throws the entire rhythm off. This is a great tool to build on ideas.
“Yes, if…” is a term I’ve heard used with Disney. This doesn’t kill an idea right away. Rather, it encourages putting conditions on ideas to bring them to life.
The next time you get presented with an idea, don’t kill it. Ideas need oxygen, they need to be picked, pulled, poked and worked through. Execution ultimately wins the day, but that never happens if we say “that won’t work” before we even get started.
Let's keep the conversation going:
Email: max@createreason.com
Twitter: @MaxOnTheTrack / @CreateReason
Web: CreateReason.com
This is a great reminder to be positive and supportive of creative ideas so they can flourish into full-fledged innovation. Thank you, Max.
Posted by: Rita Perea | April 09, 2015 at 01:04 PM