BUSINESS MATTERS Upping your Elvis factor
Chris Barez-Brown, author of How to Have Kick Ass Ideas and founder of Upping Your Elvis, has helped the likes of Nike, Coca Cola and Citibank get their Elvis rockin’. Here, he reveals how to bring the best out in your people through creative innovation, reinvigorated energy and a touch of magic.
rational thinking. Such is their confidence they are happy to pursue new avenues just because of the sensation they have felt somewhere in their body. Now that’s innovation leadership. If we spend all of our time trying to have the answers and predicting the future, all we can ever do is squeeze the magic out of our work and guarantee ourselves bland magnolia results.
W
hen Bono meets someone new on his mission to eradicate
third world debt, he often asks, ‘Who’s Elvis round here?’ It’s a great question. To my mind that person would get things done, break some rules, attract more attention and shine more brightly. Certainly a useful ally in shaking things up. I believe we can all be a bit more Elvis. We can all shine a bit more brightly. We can all make things better. I come across folk regularly who have amazing stories to tell about their creative life outside of work. However, when they clock in they turn it off.
Businesses constantly get innovation wrong. They are highly analytical, number focused and process addicted. In short, they kill innovation which is about creating magic within people. Magic comes from the way they behave, what they believe in passionately and the way they manage themselves through ambiguity and flux.
The secret of innovating is to focus on releasing your peoples’ creative genius. I fundamentally believe that everybody has the ability to be more Elvis, to shine more brightly, to break some rules and to think differently about the opportunities they see around them. As leaders we need to release people and give them the confidence to tap into their innate creative potential.
Ask for the head
A business we once worked with had an all too telling experience that resonated with me. A complicated production problem that had been a long-term headache was finally solved by someone on the shop floor. The CEO naturally went to congratulate him. When doing so, he asked why hadn’t he solved the problem before. He simply replied, ‘For 15 years you have paid for my hand, no one asked me for my head’. I believe his experience is not uncommon. We all have the potential to be incredibly creative, it’s a part of being
Chris Barez-Brown
human. However, many of us don’t engage in it because we don’t feel it’s wanted, useful, applied, our job etc. The workings of our brain mean that little processing and storage power is conscious – many believe it to be less than four per cent of our genius. So every time we engage in another clever debate about how to drive our project forward we are using a small fraction of a potential magnificence. When we make something real by trying something out and experimenting, we will engage our subconscious, which is a giant compared to the conscious part of our brain.
Harness intuition The best innovators are intuitive people. They are happy to make decisions based upon gut feel because they understand that it’s not whimsical or lightweight but rather formed from up to 20 times more processing power and data points than any
2011
Marriot St. Pierre, Chepstow,Gwent. 16th June 2011
34 COMMS DEALER MARCH 2011
Don’t talk it, do it Far too much time is spent in business analytically debating what the future might hold and how our fabulous thinking will happen in reality. The truth is we don’t know. So stop talking and just try it out. You will then get perfect feedback from a real situation and you can then adapt you’re thinking into the future. If you make it real you can only get better at what you do.
Be human and screw up Business is a human pursuit, yet so often we become someone else when we go to work. We believe that there is a type of person who gets on here, a type different from who we really are, and we pretend to be them. Such ‘schizophrenia’ may be found in any organisation, no matter how creative or cool, as we all have a strong drive to conform (if not consciously then subconsciously). This is partly because we learn by emulating, and partly because we are conditioned not to stand out from the crowd. But by doing so we lose much of our uniqueness. To shine, we have to reclaim who we are. A simple way to do so is to show more of our humanness and to let go of what is often perceived as professionalism. That means showing our
struggle, our screw-ups and our downright stupidity. We all have flaws, so let’s not pretend that we are perfect little business soldiers.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care or that we should adopt a sloppy attitude, quite the opposite. In fact by being more human we tighten up our understanding of what ‘great’ looks like. When we show a bit more of who we are, people find it endearing and will connect with us more easily, helping us to shine more brightly. This is particularly true when presenting to a group. If you are too slick, the human connection is harder to establish. The most engaging people share their foibles and get things wrong, but then work with it.
The classic story of valuing cock-ups has become a thing of legend. A man working for a bank invests tens of millions of the bank’s money in a property development that goes bump. He goes to his boss with the intention of resigning. His boss says, ‘I don’t accept your resignation. I have just spent millions of dollars on your development, I now want to see it pay off!’ If only we all had such an enlightened approach to experiments going wrong. Often we can use a failure to our advantage. Cock-ups appeal to human nature, so come clean and use them as opportunities.
If you really want to shift your business forward, harness your peoples’ minds, give them focus and make them feel good. With some leadership and gentle encouragement, you’ll soon see that Elvis lives in us all. n
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