New and Improved Innovation Blog Site

How to Create a Rabid Following the Counter-Intuitive Way

Last week the knife-sharpening guy was in our neighborhood. I love this guy. Great lessons in innovation fly off the sharpening stone that are worth sharing.

Search for his name in Google, and you see newspaper articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, and tweets from fans. I'm one, and here's another.

Tony has a pushcart with a pedal-powered sharpening stone and sharpens knives for a dollar or two. He has no scheduled route, no website, and doesn't tweet his location. If you hear his bell, you run. Two years ago, while working from home, I was on the phone with a colleague discussing something (I'm sure) very important, and hung up (sorry Blair) and ran out with my knives and scissors.

Not sure I'd want a job where people came running at me with knives and scissors, but that's another topic.

Last time he was in the neighborhood, during our chat while he worked, Tony asked what I do. I told him. His response? A loud "Bah!" with a dismissive wave.

Which triggered my gator brain.

Last week a guy driving by said he had some knives that needed sharpening, and asked where Tony would be tomorrow. Tony's reply, "I'm here now. I'll be there tomorrow," he said waving vaguely to the north.

The driver appreciates Tony's work, so he pushed, "Do you have a phone?" Tony replied, "Of course I have a phone."  Then paused a beat and said, "But it's wired in my house. I don't have a fancy cell phone like you."

So my gator brain says that Tony is a dinosaur.

So obviously there's nothing to learn from him.

On the other hand (hear the upshift as the cortex kicks in?), Tony has a fanatical following (I'm included) of people who vote with their wallets whenever they hear the bell ringing announcing his (very near) presence.  It's a limited-time offering. Because tomorrow, who knows where he'll be?

The food truck phenomenon was my first awareness of this uber-hip approach of going to a different location every day and tweeting their location for followers. And the food truck business is all the rage these days -- very different from their "roach coach" reputation of a few years ago.

So Tony, who says he's been doing this since 1978, must be a trend-setter. And a brilliant marketer (intentionally or otherwise). He keeps his product offering simple, you know what he does, he doesn't over-extend the brand, he does an outstanding job sharpening knives and he is focused on doing what he does best.

Creativity research pioneer E. Paul Torrance summed up 22 years of research on what makes children grow up to be successful, creative contributors and ended his Manifesto For C with the lines, "do what you love and can do well."

Tony seems to be living according to Dr. Torrance's advice. Are you focused on doing what you do best?

 

(Photo from: http://elmhurst.patch.com/articles/the-illusive-del-ciello-brightens-an-otherwise-ordinary-day#photo-6481207)

Step 1 on the path to innovation: Get your hands dirty (and avoid wrist injuries in the process)

Not long ago, we received an email from Stuart Sullivan, who just finished reading More Lightning, Less Thunder: How to Energize Innovation Teams. He took time out of his job as a biomedical research engineer at Zimmer to share learnings from his days of active military duty...which related to his innovation and contributions to 20 patents (at least one of which is likely working to save the lives of your loved ones in your car). 

What he shared was too good to edit, so in his words:

In my life I have been a farmer, factory worker, college student, Army Officer (active and reserve), and development engineer. Here's a lesson learned from an Infantry Basic Training company commander and drill instructors.

Most of the injuries in the hand-to-hand combat training were at the very beginning of the session. People have a natural (gator-brain?) aversion to getting dirty, getting hurt, or trying something new. So our drill instructors would take the soldiers (we don't use the term trainees any more) into the sawdust pit and have them count off 1, 2, 1, 2. The soldiers would be paired up in two circles facing each other, one circle #1, one circle #2. Then each #1 was instructed to pick up two big handfuls of sawdust, and scrub it into #2's hair (what little there was), smear it on their utility uniforms, give out a big growl and get them dirty. Then it was the #2's turn to do the same thing.

It built teamwork and camaraderie, because the soldiers were no longer concerned about getting their clean uniforms or their hands dirty. It also reduced hand and wrist injuries, because they were landing in the sawdust properly, not extending their arms to catch themselves. And it motivated the soldiers to do some effective throws on the partner that just dumped sawdust down their shirt.

So, if you get your hands, your lab jacket, your jeans, whatever, dirty up front, you're much less likely to worry about messing something else up along the line.