Meet the Author

Sir Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." His point was simple. Without the works and contributions of those that came before him, his discoveries would have never happened.

In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson refers to this concept as The Adjacent Possible. The idea is that the boundaries of innovation expand as you explore them. Or as he puts it:

Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point.

This means that innovations are almost destined to occur based on the existence of the necessary pre-conditions for their discovery. Each new innovation sets the stage for other future innovations. Innovations are less the product of singular genius, and more the product of a perfect conditions. This is why you often see the same innovations discovered in different places, by different people, in the same time period (ex. calculus, the telephone).

Without flash video, html standards and high speed internet access there would be no Youtube. The computer wouldn't have been possible without the existence of vacuum tubes, and GPS wouldn't have been created without Sputnik.

Innovations can only evolve to the adjacent possible. Successful innovations are never ahead of their time. They're merely waiting to be discovered. They're biding their time for a creative soul to build upon the disparate accomplishments of those that came before, and through that combination of existing ideas, create something entirely new.

Over the past 7 years I've read hundreds of books related to my field. Below is a list of the books that I find myself recommending over and over again.

Must Reads For Interactive Marketers

• The Brand Gap
• Eating The Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Compete
• The Mythical Man Month
• Myths of Innovation
• Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind
• Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: Guide To Creating Great Ads
• Word of Mouth Marketing
• The Viral Loop
• Truth, Lies & Advertising: The Art of Account Planning
• The CheckList Manifesto
• Chasing Cool
• How We Decide
• Drive: The Surprising Truth Of What Motivates Us
• The Art of Client Service
• The Elements of Style
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

Obviously this is list is biased and I'm sure there's some that I missed. What books would you add to the list?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

The first clue that the company wasn't interested in my true opinion was when the "service consultant" asked me to give him an excellent rating, otherwise he'd get yelled at for doing a bad job. Now the reality of the situation was, this service consultant was far from excellent. But instead of looking for feedback as a means of improvement, they've decided to look for feedback as a means of validation.

There's an old saying: What gets measured, gets managed. And if your bonus is based on a metric, customer satisfaction ratings in this case, then the organization has created an incentive to improve the numbers, not necessarily the customer experience.

Even worse, this particular organization has created a punishment response that puts the pressure of a better customer satisfaction survey response on their front line staff. As a result the staff doesn't care about providing better service, but they do care about getting that oh-so-important excellent rating.

The root cause of this issue is simple. It's a badly designed reward system that incentivizes the wrong behavior. And this phenomenon of "making it look better on paper" appears at all levels of the work world. The CEO who improves short-term performance by juggling numbers on the balance sheet is no different than the service consultant begging for a better survey rating. Or event the marketing manager who calculates ROI numbers for their campaigns by tweaking a spreadsheet.

So how do you design better reward systems? I'm not sure. It's definitely something I'd love to learn more about. If anyone has any book recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

A generation ago, my family were farmers. Farming can be a hard life, and my grandfather is the definition of tough. Not in a Clint Eastwood way; there were no mean looks or quick quips, instead my grandfather had what I refer to as "grit". He had the backbone and quiet fortitude to stick it out in tough times. He'd wake up at 4:00 am, even when he didn't feel like it.

Stephen Pressfield, in the book "The War of Art," referred to this as being a professional. He said the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional does his job even when he doesn't feel like it. Artists, like farmers, know the key to success is pushing through the difficult times even when it's the last thing in the world you want to do.

When it feels like the world is on your shoulders and you're at the breaking point. Just remember to keep it in perspective. Don't let being "busy" stress you out. Stay calm, keep your head down and work through it. During harvest season, you work the fields until you're done.

The Anna Karenina principle was popularized by Jared Diamond. It comes from a line in the book Anna Karenina.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way."

This principle states that evolutionary success doesn't occur because of some particular positive trait, it is instead the absence of any serious negative traits that leads a species to thrive. If you were to apply this idea to business, it means a deficiency in any one core element will doom a company to extinction. However, a successful company somehow avoids each and every one of these potential failures as it grows and thrives.

The bigger question then becomes, what are the core traits that lead to business failure? In the case of domesticated animals, these traits are easy to identify (dietary needs, captive breeding, disposition, panic tendency, and social structure).

I propose the following, sure to be incomplete, list of positive traits required for a sustainable business:

• Ability To Identify A Competitive Niche
• Flexibility In Adopting Internal & External Innovation
• Capability To Repeatedly Identify & Recruit Talent At Market Value
• Ability To Sustain Periods of Frugality
• Commitment To Organizational Learning

So what do you think? Did I leave anything off the list?