An effective parrot

My good friend Susan is hiring a boss.

That’s right. Hiring a boss.

SusanHiresaBoss

As we start to wrap up the SAMBA program, Susan took the traditional (and extremely ineffective) job search, cover letter, resume process and flipped it upside-down.

She created a cool website at www.SusanHiresABoss.com.

The positive responses have been overwhelming – you can learn more and read some of the comments here.

Many bosses applied to hire Susan, but one company in particular stood out.

Inventables responded back to Susan in their own unique way by creating a position called, “Susan” on the Careers page of their website. It looked like this:

Full Charge Bookkeeper

Start up CFO

Software Engineer

Susan

Susan_Inventables

It was brilliant and showed Susan that Inventables not only understood her but that they were willing to do something out of the ordinary themselves. Of all the applications, theirs clearly stood out. Susan laughed, shared it with the team and responded immediately.

By parroting back to Susan that they were a company willing to break the rules, Inventables got noticed.

What rules did you break today?

Ice, Ice, beautiful

IceStory

The weather is getting warmer and most of the ice we encounter in July is cooling down our lemonade.

Nick Cobbing’s amazing website will change how you think about frozen water. Amazing, breathtaking pictures of glacial ice in forms you’ve never seen.

His site contains a two-option “choose your own adventure”:

Surface Tension is a photographic documentary of stunning ice formations in Greenland.

Noorderlicht is the pictorial diary of the travels of a man named Dutchman Gert, aboard his 100-year-old, double-masted schooner inside the Arctic Circle.

Both stories are worth a look, so refill your lemonade, settle in and let Nick Cobbing show you ice as you’ve never seen it.

What would people love?

BlueManGroup

Innovate, don’t imitate.

The problem with taking someone else’s idea and doing it a little better is that it’s just as easy for the next company to improve it a little bit more. Cheaper labor. Faster machines. The improvement becomes a linear asymptote, until making any further improvement is costlier than the benefit gained.

Instead, dream up what people would love. Then create it.

I say dream it because nobody will ask for it. Before they existed, nobody asked for:

- the iPod
- OpenTable.com
- Build a Bear workshop
- Blue Man Group
- online check-in
- Twitter
- FedEx
- The W hotels

Nobody ever said, “wow, you know I really love writing extremely short blog posts. I wish there was a website that limited mine to 140 characters or less. THAT would be great.”

Doing something just a little better can make a few dollars in the short run but if you can tighten the screws, someone else can tighten them a bit more.

Zappos didn’t sell shoes online just a little bit better. If that was the plan, they could have stopped when they offered more sizes, colors and styles than anyone else. They dreamed that customers would love the best customer service they’ve ever experienced, online or in person. They were right (and did over $1B in sales last year).

Whether you are thinking of starting a new business or improving your existing business, ask yourself, “what would people love”?

Then build it.

Capture inspiration everywhere

back-of-the-napkin

Moments of genius are rarely scheduled ahead of time.

Detained during a battle in 1814, Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner on the back of a letter that he had in his pocket.

James Taylor came up with his signature song, Sweet Baby James, as he was driving to meet his infant nephew for the first time.

R&B singer Richard Berry jotted down the lyrics to Louie, Louie on (clean) toilet paper from the bathroom in a nightclub.

In 1940, W.C. Fields scribbled down a plot idea on some paper he found in his pocket, and sold it to Universal Studios for $25,000. It became his last film, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Fields received screenplay credit as Otis Criblecoblis.

Stories of Abraham Lincoln drafting the Gettysburgh Address on the back of an envelope and the initial plan for Southwest Airlines being drawn on a bar napkin make great stories but have been proven to be false.

Still, the examples above are the reason I’m never far from my Moleskine. Or a bar napkin.

Recapture your creativity

As you probably figured out from the name of this blog, I try to write something here everyday. Hopefully every tenth post is insightful or helpful in some way. My goal is to make you think, change or just laugh.

Writing everyday was more difficult than I expected it to be but it’s nothing compared to the project that Brock Davis took on.

Brock Davis is a creative director at Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis. Everyday in 2009, Brock decided he would make something cool and post it on his Behance portfolio.

You can see Brock’s portfolio here or by clicking on any picture in this post. DesignBoom did a recent article on Brock.

“Cool.” you say, “but I’m not creative like Brock.”

I’m calling bullshit. You ARE creative. You were creative when you were four years old, right? Back when the refrigerator was the local art gallery, you were the star. Most of our schools and companies teach us out of our creativity.

Recapture your creativity. Overcome your resistance. If Brock can do it 365 times, you can surely do it once. Make something cool tomorrow or the next day. Anything. If you want, email it to me and I’ll showcase the best one (or top ten) in a future post.