How a 'Revolution in Ideas' Can Reshape Your Business
There's been a quiet revolution brewing in small business for decades.
Businesses that do things just a little different. Businesses like Zappos and Kiva, 37Signals and Gravity Ten Twenty.
We Love What We Do
You might not know about Gravity Ten Twenty yet. They're a local restaurant owned by the Fort Collins Brewery. When your meal is finished, instead of using those black vinyl check signing books that everybody else uses, Gravity Ten Twenty brings you out your check in a cookbook.
One of the cookbooks is a personal souvenir of the manager -- a signed Gordon Ramsay cookbook. Customers point this out all the time: "Did you know this is a signed copy of this book!?"
"Yeah," she says, "It's cool -- that's why I wanted you to see it."
Businesses who combine the wow-factor of a great product with the wow-factor of actually caring about what they do (at all levels) are the winners. And they're grabbing up more and more market share from their competitors.
Apple is another an easy example; their interface and product quality knocks the competition dead. That extends to Apple business partners like OtterBox. OtterBox makes what can only be described as hard-core cases for Apple products (as well as other smartphone brands).
The employees love the products they make. They're known for doing some pretty crazy things to get people to buy their cases. The best story I know of was when an OtterBox employee handed an encased iPhone to an interested customer and asked 'em to chuck it into the street.
After flying about 10 feet and landing with a nice skid across the pavement, the OtterBox case was a bit scratched -- but the phone was just fine.
"Would you do that with your phone?" the customer asked. The OtterBox employee opened up the case and went to the contact list, "This is my phone."
I've heard a few different versions of this same story (in one, the employee calls his wife, her husband, his mom, whatever). I'm fairly certain it's got some basis in reality, as my three-year-old drop-prone iPhone 3G will attest.
Rethinking the Cultivation of Ideas
Take the recent surge of TEDx event creations -- beyond just wanting to belong to something amazing, TEDx event curators are not only bringing amazing culture into their cities, but bringing out the best of their city's own culture.
Beyond that, you have Ignite -- a series of speedy presentations, originally conceived to prevent conference-goers from being bored out of their skulls by unending lectures. Add to that the recent resurgence of Unconferences (formerly called Open Space Technology) and you've got a revolution forming in the cultivation of ideas -- not just the implementation of them.
It's the responsibility of every business owner to look for disruptive technology and trends, and then figure out how to change the business to use them. Social media is a way to crowd-source your marketing efforts, based entirely on the permission and trust you've garnered from your audience.
Ten years ago, the thought of Apple creating a cell phone was absurd, but in 2007, there it was. And now it's dominating -- enough that if you're still using a Blackberry, you seem old school.
If your business isn't turning the status quo on its head, you're doing something wrong.
Not a Renaissance -- a Revolution
IT is notorious for not keeping up, because it becomes impossible to provide support for every new little thing users want to do. It's easier to follow a homogeneous approach and tell outliers to get in line. Except now, its your customers who are becoming the outliers. The kinds of requests I get after building a simple website for someone have gone from reasonably common types of things to increasingly outlandish (and usually very creative) types of functionality.
The change that's about to enter full swing isn't a renaissance; it's a revolution. A revolution in the minds of customers, employees, and communities about how to create, share, cultivate, update, and implement ideas. The faster businesses open up every aspect of their business to that kind of interaction, the better they'll fare.
The first step is, thankfully, very easy: Ask every stakeholder what they could use from you to improve your product or service. I guarantee you'll hear some things that surprise you.
You can find more from Nick Armstrong on Twitter and at his personal website.
