Be Obsessed

One of the biggest challenges facing innovation in organizations is a lack of care. Nothing snuffs the creative spark like apathy. Indeed, many of the best tools in our toolkit are useless unless they are wielded by a passionate desire to solve the right problem.

I loved the example of one such obsession in the early days of Netflix, which Marc Randolph recounts in That Will Never Work:

“One of the biggest problems we had to solve before launch was the mailer. My initial test with Reed had been a simple greeting card envelope, but we couldn't send thousands of DVDs across the country as naked discs inside flimsy envelopes. We needed a real mailer, one that would protect the disc on an unpredictable journey through the interstate postal system. It also had to be sturdy enough that it could be used again, when the customer sent the disc back. We had to make it easy to use. Intuitive to figure out. And it had to be small and light enough to qualify as first-class mail. The moment our mailer veered into fourth-class-mail territory, our costs went up and delivery speeds went down. And neither of those outcomes would be sustainable.

We experimented wildly: cardboard, cardstock, craft paper, Tyvek, plastic. We tried squares and rectangles of all sizes. We inserted tabs. We tried foam pads. Thousands of designs ended up on the cutting-room floor after Christina, Jim, or I deemed them unworkable. There were days I went into the office and couldn't tell if the table near the back was filled with Netflix mailer materials or the detritus from one of my son's preschool cut-and-paste projects.

Getting the mailer perfect was key - it was the first physical point of contact we'd have with our users. If our discs arrived broken, or late, or dinged, or scratched - or if a user couldn't figure out how to mail discs back to us using our packaging - then we were doomed. It was a massively important project, and one that I was heavily involved with in the early days. I stayed late tinkering with prototypes, sketched out ideas on napkins during meals. Sometimes, at night, I dreamed about mailers.”

Staying at the office late. Dreaming at night. Sketching on napkins. Thousands of prototypes.

Obsession fuels innovation.

Related: Drive Innovation Through Care
Related: Solve The Right Problem
Related: Consider The Odds
Related: Experiment Broadly
Related: Recapturing Employee Imagination

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