Book Review: Small Is The New Big

I've read couple of Seth Godin books before and always enjoyed those. This Small Is The New Big got to my bookshelf almost by accident, but knowing the author I couldn't leave it unread. I'm so happy I did read it. Even though the book is bit old already the ideas in it are mainly fresh and valuable.

This book is not a real book actually. It's a collection of best blog posts from Seth. For the weirdest reasons it's in alphabetic order, but it still flows quite nicely forward.

It's hard to say anything actual about the book. The only thing I can say is that I felt really energetic reading this book. I was full of ideas and even made some decisions about my future goals reading this book.

I think I'll make it mandatory for myself to read one Seth Godin a year. Even I knew exactly what to expect from the book, still I amazed myself to feel so good reading it. Seth has a brilliant mind and good writing skills which makes the reading experience wonderful.

I recommend to read some of Seth Godin books. If you can't really concentrate on reading properly, this is the book for you. Stories are short but full with good insights. If you enjoy reading more take some other of Seth Godin books.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Team day activity - Real life human hunt

I with few others were assigned to arrange team day with quite low budget. It was also stated, that it should be something that wasn't done before. The list of what they had done before, was quite a long one.

After brainstorming a bit, we got the idea of a getaway. We would escape from rest of the group and let the others to wonder where and what is going to happen. The we would start giving hints and tips where we are and what we are doing. The idea was that they would start chasing us and after finding we would move together to arranged place to eat and party.

We looked for different alternatives how to actually make the idea happen. We realized we need a app with which we could share our location and others could follow. We started to look from Foursquare and other location share apps to find a perfect one, but none of those actually did the trick. Finally one day we hit to an app called Glympse which was a perfect match for our needs. With Glympse we could share our exact location in a map for 10 minutes and then disappear totally.

In order to make this hunt even better, we made a blog to blogger, which we the fugitives and the hunters could post photos and text on the fly. This would give a little spice to the hunt.

At the scheduled team day, none of the others knew what was going to happen. About an hour before the team was scheduled to start, we the fugitives one by one left the office. Then 14:55, 5 minutes before the team day start, we send a mail to the rest of the group: "Team day has been kidnapped". We stated that we decided to keep the party ourselves and tell you later what it was like. We wanted to give them one change: for the next 2 hours, we will be appearing for 10 minutes via Glympse every 20 minutes. If they could find us within that 2 hours, they could join the party.

Idea and execution worked perfectly. We were bit afraid that, would our people actually be playful enough to start chasing us. That worry was unnecessary. First chasers started chasing from our first 14:55 mail,5 minutes before the chase start. We deliberately attached a photo to the first mail, which had a hint of our location. Of course that was a trick from our end to get some of the hunters to leave to wrong direction. That worked out perfectly.

The whole thing worked out perfectly. One group of hunters got us quite fast, but some had to use more than an hour to catch us. It was a fun team day and I recommend to try it out. It's a fun way to spend some time outside and playing a real life game.


Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Ideas are seeds, execution are the plants

Ideas are almost worthless. Good ideas might be worth something, but without taking proper actions from ideas, they are not worth anything. Ideas are like seeds, they don't cost much and those are quite easy to find from anywhere. Seeds don't start to grow without planting those to the right grounds and starting to take care of those. That's the same with ideas, if you just keep those in your drawer, nothings going to happen to those ideas.

Once in a while someone comes to me and says, I have a great business idea. What if we would do this and that, wouldn't it be amazing. I admit that I've done the same. I have a pile of business ideas in my virtual drawer (in Google Docs) where I type out those ideas for storage when those come to my mind. For a long time, I thought those are important and kind of like a treasure for me. Just recently I've figured out that those are not worth anything. Really, those are not worth anything. Those are just ideas, which might lead to somewhere with good execution, but ideas as such don't have any value to anyone. It's the same with this post. This post as an idea in my mind, didn't have any value to anyone. I discussed about this subject with my colleagues few days back and then there came some value to the ideas and now this actually materializes to it's current value with my execution to this blog. 

A week ago I read an excellent post from Derek Sivers about value of ideas (here's the post). The idea in his post is that execution is tens of thousands or million time's more valuable than just the idea. That's what I'm trying to say in this post also, ideas are really not worth much or if anything without execution. Execution is the thing that makes ideas fly, not the ideas itself.

Reason I and many else have been careful about sharing ideas that we've thought that they do have a value and that someone might steal those ideas. Sure someone might steal your idea if you share with others, but most often you need to really have marvelous idea for anyone to even listen your ideas. And like I've said many times, execution and the vision is the thing that matters, not the idea itself. If you are sure about your idea being really good, don't worry about someone stealing it, go ahead and execute better than others. There's always going to be competition, maybe it's better to face it early.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever protect your ideas. In some cases it might be wise to keep your ideas with small group or only share parts of your idea to others. The main point still is, that you should think when the ideas really start to get value. Is partly done done, or not done at all. Some could argue that there isn't any value created on any doing before it's really out there with real users.

For organizations this might be different. Some bigger companies do get extra value of not publishing ideas before execution, in order to get more publicity from the launch of a product or a service. For smaller companies it might be quite the opposite, they could actually gain publicity or funding for their product or a service for opening up ideas really early to public. They can get fast feedback and tips for the execution for opening up the ideas sooner than later. And at the end, what will make a difference is the execution.

If you have a brilliant idea, maybe the best thing you could do would be to spread the idea to everyone willing to listen as much as you can. Best thing that could happen to you might be, that someone else things that the idea is great. And that might even lead to the next step of execution of the idea. With keeping the idea to yourself, most probably the idea will just die itself to old age.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Innovation is all about execution

Innovation is often misthought to be all about ideas. Often people think that great ideas means great innovations. Actually ideas as such don't have much value. Ideas are easy to come up with, but what makes a difference is the execution.

One consequence of this false thinking of ideas being the important thing on creating innovative products, are all the systematic innovation methods and processes that are seen with companies and other organisations. From the book Inside Steve's brain I loved Steve Jobs citate:"trying to systemize innovation, is like somebody not cool, trying to be cool". That's exactly what I've felt on these innovation boosting systems what I've seen in many different places. They are focused on gathering new ideas. Often those even give the greatest value to ideas which are most original and are most weird and out of the current world. Revolution is quite rare, evolution is happening all the time.

Best projects where I've take part have had a real focus on details. Those have had a vision of an idea and then we've all been together working hard to get all the smallest details right. That have required lot of iterations and lot of errors. Making a mistake is a key thing on creating great innovative products. If you never make a mistake when creating something new and innovative, then you've just never realised the importance of learning and mistakes on you creation process.

I learned from the same book Inside Steve's brain another great quote, this one is from Pablo Picasso: "Good artist copy, great artist steal". This tells exactly what innovation is mainly about. If you think companies like Apple, they haven't really ever invented anything totally new. They've just taken good ideas from others and owned those and made those perfect. Same is true almost about any products or companies that are thought to be innovative. If you think Facebook, there's been social networks before them, they just executed theirs perfectly. Same is true about Toyota Prius. This innovative hybrid car was not the first or only car on the market that time, Toyota just executed perfectly and kept improving their early prototypes. Innovation is often about stealing, undesrtanding a great idea and improving it to be perfect when creating the product.

When you are working on innovative products, concentrate on details and vision of a problem you are solving. Overall all innovative products are solving real user problems. Some of these problems are just problems that will come obvious in the future and people don't really understand having those yet. If you think of mobile phones as an example, people didn't know twenty years ago, that they would need to be able to communicate with others everywhere. With mobile phones, the problem has always been there, people just didn't think that it could be solved.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen