How Do You Make Time For New Ideas When You Are Already Booked to the Max?

 By Steve Eaton

How innovative are you if the Beddelman report is due at 2 p.m. and it’s 1 p.m.? If the boss is expecting something of you right now, can you make time in your schedule to think up new ideas and game-changing strategies?

At the Huntsman School of Business we talk about the entrepreneurial spirit and emphasize the importance of innovative thinking. In today’s fast-paced workplace, however, tapping the creative powers of your employees and yourself can be more than a little challenging.

Years ago I attended a memorable and outstanding workshop on creativity given by the late Gordon MacKenzie, author of “Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace.” He had worked for Hallmark and said that even though the company depended on creative ideas for its product, the culture didn’t always encourage things that weren’t part of the status quo.

“Trying to get an idea through Hallmark was like trying to drive a four-wheel drive truck through a mountain of cooked oatmeal,”he said. “You never have a sense of hitting a wall but eventually you come to a stop.”

At one point he was asked to take a new position that would be charged, in part, with encouraging innovation at the company. Gordon came up with the title “creative paradox.”

Once he got that title he decorated his new office with candles, a giant wood telephone wire spool for his desk, and signs that featured Chinese characters, even though he had no idea what they meant. He even hung from the ceiling an unsual chair he purchased from an artist. The chair had wings and a halo on the back of it and he dangled it just above his regular chair, tilted forward. He wanted it to look as if he had just fallen from the ceiling chair into his regular chair.

People would come in to this strange, mystical office and present their ideas to him and he would listen intently and say, “Good idea.”

Employees, emboldened by the approval of the creative paradox would go back to their supervisor and tell him or her their idea, adding that the creative paradox liked it. The middle-managers would try to find the creative paradox on the company organization chart but Gordon's title wasn’t there. Fearing he might be above them in the pecking order, the managers would often allow their employees to proceed with their creative idea just to be safe. Hallmark used a “creative paradox” to free up innovative ideas.

A story in the Jan. 19 Wall Street Journal, “The Trouble With Tinkering With Time,” talks about how different companies have tried to give their employees more time for innovation. Google is famous for its “20% initiative” where employees are encouraged to work on projects that are not related to their job description.

The writer, Alec Foege, says that companies can be terrified to let people “tinker” with new ideas on company time.

“They’ve got enough to do already thank you very much,” he writes. “Innovation at its heart, is a torturous anarchical act. True tinkerers are dilettantes, free-form creative types motivated more by their own curiosity than by the bottom line. In short, they aren’t the kinds of employees most big companies like adding to the payroll in the first place.”

He writes that just one drawback of a firm officially structuring innovation time is that “being ordered to tinker robs the activity of personal passion.” He suggests that one radical approach would be to allow people to directly profit from their successful ideas. He warns that companies who embark on these initiatives have to make room for “genuine creative chaos without clear goals,” and that they need to know that repeated failure is part of the deal with such a strategy.

I was once asked to come up with a presentation that my company’s executives could use to help employees understand the firm’s latest goals. I came up with quite the unorthodox presentation that proved more than a little memorable. If you come to my office in the basement you can see a sign that reads, “Rewarding Top Employees With Spam.” That’s a left-over prop from that presentation.

One of my favorite parts of the song and dance I created for my superiors was a lightly scripted moment that had me bursting into a room while the executive was making the presentation. I would get into an argument with him or her that would eventually lead to me being thrown out of the meeting, much to the delight of my coworkers. I proved quite good at being booted from meetings and they even sent me on the road to be ejected mid-presentation in other places where the company had offices.

That was fun creativity for me but it came because the executives were willing to take the risk and encourage such ideas.

I’m not sure what the secret is to institutionalizing innovation. Gordon MacKenzie said creativity is not the kind of thing you can mandate and measure. The most innovative people I know are the right-brained sorts who are great at generating new ideas but not so good on the follow up. What do you do to keep yourself from falling into a rut? How do you reinvent your work? Send us a blog post or just share a new idea or two. Maybe you’ll end up being someone celebrated for revolutionizing higher education as we know it now or … maybe you’ll just get thrown out of a meeting. That’s all part of the risk you take. Are you up to the challenge, or are you going to finish the Beddleman report first?

Utahns Should Park the Monster Plows and Enjoy a Snow Day

Editor’s note: The column below ran in the Deseret News in November of 2010 but the author, our own Steve Eaton, feels the message is one that people in Utah still need to hear. “Utah people know so little about snowy weather and driving,” he said. “I think they could learn a thing or two from the people of Washington State where I grew up.” This column is used with permission from the Deseret News.

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It's started to snow again, and it's becoming clear to me that people in Utah don't know how to deal with snow. My family moved here from Seattle, where we would get snow just every other year, and we do a better job with snow than you Utahns do.

Here is a basic rule about snow that is apparently rocket science to most of you: If there is visible snow on the ground, start canceling stuff. You should cancel school, work and church meetings. Close everything.

That's what snow is for: an excuse to cancel stuff.

In Washington, we were so good at this that we took it a step further. In the Evergreen State, if snow is just being forecast, you should cancel stuff. You don't even have to wait for the snow to fall. This is called a snow day, and a snow day is a lot like a vacation day. Think about this carefully for a few seconds. Are you getting this? Something has gone terribly off track here. When I went through my first winter here and tried to explain this concept to people I got a three-step reply.

First, we never cancel anything because of snow. This is stated as if it's a bragging point. That's very confusing to me. It's like boasting, I never turn on the lights in our house, even if I walk into stuff.

Second, they say, the snow we are experiencing now is nothing compared to the way it used to be. It used to snow 14 feet in an hour. You couldn't even open your front door, the snow was so high. You would pour a glass of water in the house and it would freeze before you could drink it.

This leads to the third reply: Even then, we didn't cancel anything. We don't cancel anything for snow.

The principle of snow disrupting things is such a key concept in Washington, that if it does snow and people don't cancel things, well, we just go out and crash. We spin and crash. We go into ditches. We get out of our cars and fall down. And we don't have to wait until we get out on the roads to do it. We crash in our driveways and in parking lots. We're good at it.

When you go outside and it is cold and you fall down, that's nature's way of telling you that you've made a mistake. You're supposed to take the day off.

Here's another part of the equation. Everyone should be talking about the impending storm when a blizzard is coming and what things might be canceled. The newscasts here don't inspire panic. People don't rush out and buy generators if a storm is coming.

In Seattle, the TV people give storms cool names like "The Arctic Blast of 2008," and they come up with great graphics and warn of death, looting and destruction. Here, all we get is this dire warning: snow likely.

We live near a hill, and some of the recent snowstorms made the hill very slick. This meant that some people couldn't make it up the hill. When I saw this start to happen, I ran out in my sneakers to try to help.

It turns out that standing on an ice-covered hill behind a 6-ton car that is spinning its tires and sliding backwards isn't that helpful.

One of the people I went to help asked me what would happen if they just did a U-turn and went back down the hill. Since I'm from Washington, I didn't know. My guess was that they would just start doing out-of-control donuts down the hill because that's what we would do in Washington.

To the credit of local officials, they eventually canceled the hill. They closed it but only for a few minutes until this monster snowplow showed up that completely cleared the snow.

While we're at it, explain this to me: What's with the monster snowplows? We thought it was an earthquake the first time one went by.

I assume snowplows cost a lot of tax dollars and, because they make the driving safer, they make people stop canceling stuff. Trying to explain this just tires me out. It seems so simple. I'd write more but I think I'd better get out and buy a generator and batteries. Snow is likely. I hope the stores aren't already closed.

— Steve Eaton

Grateful for a Computer With a Heartbeat

This week, just as I was on deadline for the Huntsman Post,my computer crashed. To use a football analogy to show you how close I was to meeting that deadline before the crash: I was down by two touchdowns with three minutes to play in the fourth quarter. I had come in early, was planning on staying late, and was believing that with a successful on-side kick or blocked punt I could still get a victory. 

Then, suddenly, just before the snap, each member of my offensive line died at the same time of a heart attack. That's the part where my computer crashed. Suddenly I was in a totally different game.

If you take away my ability to type and do e-mail, my world changes. After I organize and clean my office, all I can do is go outside and plant crops. Thankfully, the guy in the office next door to mine is Tom James. He has actual job skills and he deals in these type of work crisis situations every day at the Huntsman School of Business. Computers crash, and people run to him as their vocational world starts to unravel. He calmly goes about defragmenting hard-disk megabytes and downloading drivers, and soon he is rebuilding things and saving the day. Since his office is nearby, I see this drama play out on a regular basis but, of course, it’s much more serious when I’m facing a technology meltdown.

While he was in the other room hitting my computer with those shock pads, hoping to get a heartbeat, I found an old laptop in my office that had been retired years ago because it too had a tendency to crash. I plugged it in, booted it up and it worked—sort of. Because I do a lot of my work in Drop Box, I was able to get to many of my latest documents. It was still a painful process to meet deadline because many of the things I normally do without even thinking became more difficult. Sort of like throwing a long pass after your offensive line drops dead.

Everything was slow. I could have run a lap around the building every time I clicked on something expecting a response. Normally, I have two computer screens, which proves extremely helpful when I am writing stories and press releases from typewritten notes, e-mail information or audio recordings that live in my computer. I couldn’t use those two screens anymore. I could still progress but it was like writing left-handed—underwater.

Within 24 hours Tom had my computer back to life and working again. It’s sort of sad, however, because she doesn’t remember me anymore and has forgotten all my preferences and what we did together last Christmas. She is sometimes confused when I ask her to do things she used to do all the time like print a document or launch a program. I’ll click on a program and she wants to know if I agree with pages and pages of rules before she’ll let me use it. She used to trust me.

It is sort of like in Star Trek when Spock was finally tapping his human side and then they killed him off at the end of the movie only to try to bring him back to life in the next movie. The new Spock had forgotten some of the Star Trek movies he made just like we had.

I remember as a kid I watched a cartoon show about the future called “The Jetsons.” In the episode I remember, two of the main characters were in the military and were being punished by being put on a clean-up detail. It meant that they had to sit at a panel and punch buttons and watch as robots did the actual scrubbing and sweeping. They complained to each other of the difficulty of the detail and how that part of the military, where they punish you with hard labor, not changed in hundreds of years. They weren’t doing any actual work. They were just punching buttons.

So what percentage of your day involves mouse clicks and typing? What happens to your world when your laptop crashes or your smart phone gets dumb? Have you ever thought doing something was too hard because it might have involved ten or fifteen clicks?

Now, I know where you think I’m going with this. You think I’m going to complain about us all using smart phones too much and never communicating in person. You think I’m going to advocate for an Amish lifestyle and a car that runs on corncobs. I’m not. The technology I use every day allows me to communicate, keep my job, and makes it so I’ll never ever have to go back to the circus where I grew up.

This Thanksgiving I’m going to be grateful for the very technology that everyone loves to complain about. I need my computer even if she seems distant to me right now like we are strangers that just met. I’ll win her over. And it just so happens that I care about my iPhone that connects me to eBay where there is soooo much stuff that I really need to buy before it is too late.

When I get home there is plenty of real manual labor to do. Don’t worry. I’ll stay connected to the earth. Most of it is in my garage and I’ll need to sweep it out. In one way, we are sort of like the Jetsons, you know.

Only in our case, it is my wife who has figured out how to push my buttons.

—Steve Eaton

Top Ten Productivity Apps For the iPhone Junkie

I am probably the only person in the world who has more productivity apps on my iPhone than games. I could have funded a trip to Maui and back with the money I’ve spent on apps that process, track, list and analyze things. So, I thought I’d share with you my top 10 productivity apps so far.

1.     “Drop Box” – Free - Dave Patel, a Huntsman executive type who knows stuff and has been there and done that, told me about Drop Box and it has become something I use every day. Since many documents I work on become group-editing projects, they end up in Drop Box where everyone can get at them. Once something is in Drop Box I can access it on my phone which means I can continue to work on projects even while in a line at the grocery store or while I’m waiting for a meeting to begin. (Of course, you can also use it to work on stuff while you are on vacation or watching a sunset, which can cause your wife to whack you on the side of the head. Be careful.) It’s free because they want you to use it so much you’ll start storing all your pictures, documents and even old socks in there. Once you are hooked, they charge you to for added storage space.

2.     “Docs To Go” - $9.99 – I know, spending $10 for an app in the iTunes world is like paying $200,000 for something in real-life dollars. It’s expensive. But it is a grown-up app you need if you want to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on your phone. (I’ve never used it for PowerPoint but I suppose that I could always give PowerPoint presentations to people who are in line with me at the grocery store.) I bought this so I could open the work stuff I store in “Drop Box.”

3.     “Easy TimeSheet” - $2.99 – There’s a free version but I wanted all the bells and whistles. This app allows you to not only track how long it takes you to complete a project, like writing a blog, but to figure out how much your company paid for that particular project based on your hourly time rate. This would be a better app if I could find another app that reminds me to stop it when I switch projects and start it when I begin a new project. If you have a lot of multi-tasking and moving pieces in your work life, this can be a difficult app to maximize.

4.     iBlueSky - $9.99 – Have you ever tried mind mapping? This is a great app for organizing your thoughts. Also, if you take notes in class with a mind map approach like this you can really remember things for a long time. (If you have a disorganized, rambling teacher, however, it will drive you crazy trying to take notes in a mind-map format.) If you hate lists but also hate forgetting stuff and being undependable, you could make this app work for you too. I think someday, when I am an evolved, peaceful person, I will have my to-do lists in iBlueSky. There are lots of apps that do mind mapping approaches but the others have square bubbles that are too rigid and or goofy bubbles that make you feel like you are in junior high. This one is simple, clean, with no caffeine.

5.     “Touch Goal” – $3.99 – This is a good app for people who like to assign point values to stuff they do so they can have a total score at the end of the day. For example, you could give yourself 20 points for sticking to a diet all day and one point for every time you pick up a piece of trash outside and throw it away, proving you are a good person. I know, I know, the idea of quantifying your day with a score will horrify all you right-brained, mentally-balanced, sunset-watching people. Not me. I just give myself 10 points if I can watch a sunset without getting whacked by my wife.  

6.     “Streaks – Motivation Calendar” - $1.99 – Sports figures have people tracking all the stuff they do so that someone can announce how many passes in a row they’ve caught or how many games in a row they’ve got on base. Why shouldn’t you use this to keep track of things you consistently do, like how often you exercise or how many days in a row you can go without complaining? (My personal record is five days and it would be higher if it weren’t for that no-good, stupid … oops. I guess I’ll have to start over tomorrow.)

7.     “Daily Tracker” – Free – This is an app that includes just about everything you could want for tracking things, including a “to-do-list” and “expenses” function. I use it to track how much sleep I get. We all think we don’t get enough sleep. I know, however, that in 2012 I’ve been averaging 7:06 minutes a night, something I would not have believed, if had not tracked it myself. (Caution: if you are someone who likes to honestly brag about how little sleep you get, this app could spoil all that for you.)

8.     MyFitnessPal – Free – I use MyFitnessPal to track calories. It has bazillion foods listed. And it remembers which foods you eat most often so they are always at top your list. When you type in “chocolate chip cookie,” for example, you don’t have to go searching for it, it knows your cookie habit. You can also fix it so your friends can see how you are doing and give you a bad time if you eat only chocolate chip cookies.

9.     Tactio Health - $1.99 – I use Tactio Health to track my weight because it predicts the future. For example, it says if I continue to lose weight at the rate I am right on my current diet, I will have lost 450 pounds and reached my goal by April 3, 2013. It’s fun as long as you are losing weight but if you gain weight it gets rude and tells you things like, if you don’t get serious, you won’t reach your goal until 2038 or worse yet, you’ll NEVER reach your goal. On this app you can also track lots of things like body mass, resting pulse, activity, cholesterol and chlora-hydrine-fiber levels. This is the kind of stuff healthy, skinny people like to track. I just use it to predict the future.

10.  “Clear” - $1.99 – If you love crossing things off your to-do list, this is the app for you. It’s a very simple app but it is very addictive. It doesn’t allow you to do project management, scheduling or a thousand other things lots of apps offer but it gives you a little shot of joy when you check stuff off your list because it makes this little happy Star Trek noise. If you aren’t a list maker, don’t even try it. You’ll never understand.

The above list changes almost daily. I’m always searching out new apps in hopes of finding the perfect app that fixes everything and brings joy, peace and top-quality pizza into my life on a regular basis.

Now this list, of course, doesn’t cover game aps, entertainment apps, news apps, book aps or all the fitness and running apps I have bought. I don’t even mention “Coop Shoot,” a must-have game app. That game app was developed by former Huntsman student Britney Johnson, and current Huntsman students Lauren and Shai McDonald, and they are way smart and cool, so everyone should have that app.

There are so many apps. There are even apps to help you find apps. What are some of your favorite apps? Let me know and maybe I’ll check them out next time I’m watching a sunset or I’ll share them in a future blog post.

— Steve Eaton

Steve Eaton, is the director of communications, for the Jon M. Huntsman School or Business or, as some people call him, “the PR guy in the basement.” He writes a column for the Deseret News that can be seen here. http://bit.ly/AuYLYF