Ideaflow

When the pandemic hit, Perry and I started exploring work on a book. After months of fits and starts, we settled on a topic and put it in front of a few publishers. We were humbled by the response. During the holidays, we were offered a deal by Penguin Random House's business imprint, Portfolio. We are pretty excited about it. Should be out next fall, 2022.

The fundamental premise is that to deliver creativity and innovation, you need a lot of ideas; and to discover which ideas have merits that warrant additional investment, you need to run scrappy experiments. Many of the topics I've touched upon in various blogs may find their way into the book:

The volume required to achieve breakthrough restults, how input drives output, be deliberate about seeking inspiration, the importance of diversions, how to run hygienic experiments, cultivating a daily creative practice, etc.

The reason I bring it up now is, when Mar Hershenson and were interviewing Ana Leyva last week, Mar said something I loved. Ana was describing her fairly robust process for launching new themes at Lelu, and was sharing how every employee posts ideas ahead of time, so that they always have a long list to wittle down. She shared how each employee is given votes on a scale of 1-3, and how they all vote to determine which themes to pursue. They even get customers involved to break tie votes!

I mentioned how important it is to have a robust list that you can move through rapidly, how that's the subject of a lot of my own research interest, and Mar said, "One key metric for success for an early stage venture is, how many ideas you can get through in a period of time?" When I pushed on the definition of "get through," she elaborated, "It's about getting some sort of market validation. Not comprehensive, but building the organizational capacity to get to ~80% validation relatively quickly is a critical thing to learn."

I'd argue that it's a key metric of success for a venture of any size, from the individual to the institution. What constitutes "idea" may change depending on the altitude, but I believe that the number of ideas tested per unit of time is a critical metric for not only entrepreneurs, but also business leaders and creative professionals alike.

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