book.chapter Habit #1 – ideas: innovative thinking

Producers have a deep understanding of customer needs, allowing them to envision new offerings and business models to address those needs. Performers, on the other hand, focus on making incremental improvements to existing offerings, business models, and markets. When examining the stories of most self-made billionaires, a similar pattern emerges repeatedly. These billionaires work in an industry for many years, gaining awareness of emerging trends just starting to take effect. Through deep empathy for customers developed over time, they see an unmet customer need. Drawing on their imagination and domain expertise, they conceive a product or service with broad appeal. Paradoxically, many producers spend years working as performers, gathering the hands-on experience necessary for real breakthrough innovation. Empathetic imagination springs from extensive firsthand experience. There is often a market on the cusp of change, with an unrecognized customer need ready to be tapped into. A producer with profound empathy for customer needs also possesses the imagination to transform that understanding into a big business idea with widespread appeal. The combination of empathetic insight and imagination is the producer's formula for envisioning a blockbuster concept. A great illustration of empathetic imagination is Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon. Although born in California, Wilson grew up in Vancouver, Canada where his father taught physical education and his mother pursued sewing as a hobby. On childhood visits to his grandparents in California, Wilson noticed the emerging surfing trend. As a larger guy, he disliked the tight surfing shorts of the times and decided to make a longer, baggier short for himself and friends. Nobody had created surfing shorts that way before. Wilson invested $10,000 to open his own store, Westbeach Surf, and eventually sold over one million branded surfing shorts in America, Europe, and Japan before selling the company in 1997. Looking for a new endeavor, Wilson saw that yoga was experiencing similar growth. In 1998 he launched Lululemon as a retailer of chic yoga clothing, a new concept. Largely on the strength of its innovative yoga pants with flat seams, Lululemon grew into a billion-dollar business. Wilson leveraged his experience, customer empathy, and imagination to achieve remarkable success. As John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen write, true producers do not dismiss ideas because they seem improbable or difficult. A lifetime of expertise, curiosity, and customer empathy empowers them to escape conventional thinking and gain visionary insights for creating tremendous value. Interestingly, most self-made billionaires build on established markets rather than entirely new technologies. They achieve their blockbusters through customer insight more than superior technology, reinventing existing products. Their intimate knowledge of the status quo becomes an advantage rather than a liability. So how can you act more like a self-made billionaire? Make empathy a habit by continually putting yourself in the shoes of current customers, potential target customers, suppliers, investors, and so on. Grasp their perspectives and the nuances involved. Look for clues about future growth based on current changes and anticipate what customers will want. Focus on fulfilling emerging customer needs rather than defining yourself narrowly by what you currently do. Have a bias toward action—try things and learn. Allow failure and treat it as a learning experience. Encourage empathetic imagination organization-wide to increase breakthrough potential. Give people opportunities to interact directly with real customers for firsthand experience. Let employees own promising ideas to incentivize innovation. Nurture curiosity by facilitating learning about new areas. Allow promising intrapreneurs to test bold ideas directly with customers and get valuable feedback. Assemble cross-functional teams with broad expertise to evaluate ideas. Encourage reading widely to spark creative thinking. Successful producers can conceive breakthroughs while simultaneously considering refinements. In contrast, most leaders seek only incremental gains while producers pursue transformative innovation. As Sviokla and Cohen state, skilled producers fully explore improbable or difficult ideas by leveraging their expertise, curiosity, and customer empathy. Inspiration finds producers actively working to unlock it. With the right mindset and environment, empathetic imagination can power new breakthroughs.