Today Scott Belsky’s new book hits the shelves: Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality. It gets to the heart of how to do more Great Work, and I’m a raving fan. Pick up a copy, and re-listen to our interview that I first posted in January 2010.
“It’s not about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.”
I love that statement. I know from my time teaching and consulting on innovation and creativity that actually having ideas, when you know how, is pretty easy. But actually executing ideas – ahh, that’s a different matter. Scott Belsky is the CEO and founder of Behance and what he stands for is making ideas happen. Behance operates the leading online platform for creative professionals – which means, helping creatives find a place to get together and to think about, how do we make our ideas happen? Scott and Behance also run the 99% Blog and the 99% Conference.
In this interview we talk about:
- Why looking to the short-term can be a powerful execution strategy
- How to overcome the tragedy that most ideas are born and lost in isolation
- And why ‘acting without conviction” is a handy strategy for keeping things going
You can follow Scott on Twitter@behance, on the Behance website and on the 99% Blog.
Posted on April 15, 2010
I’m a big fan of Matt May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. It speaks to my belief that design is an increasingly critical element of everything we do. Not just for those of us in the “creative” industries, but for all of us in all we do. With so much stuff everywhere – content is free – it is through design and elegance we find solutions and create value…and do Great Work.
Matt’s first award-winning book was called The Elegant Solution, and was written after many years advising Toyota on business design and helping build Toyota University. He now spends much of his time advising corporations on how to build in elegance and design into the work that they do.
In our conversation we talk about:
- The important difference between basic vanilla simplicity and elegant simplicity
- Why you need a “To Not Do” list
- How to find the sweet spot between your skills and the challenge at hand
- And what drives Tiger Woods to succeed. (Yes, we did this interview Before The Scandal)
You can follow Matt on Twitter at @MatthewEMay and at his website www.InPursuitOfElegance.com.
Posted on March 31, 2010
Jason Fried’s new book Rework comes out today, and I’m delighted that we managed to talk just a week ago in the lead up to its launch. Now here’s a quote to kick us off. It’s from Seth Godin, and he says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Make everything a project – and run it through 37Signals’ Basecamp.” Jason is the one of the founders of 37Signals. They design useful software to help people work better – connect with people, run projects, managing stuff. (I know, because I use it!)
And what’s cool is they haven’t done it by practising business as usual, but by practising business as unusual. In this interview Jason shares some of his successful and counter-intutive approaches to how to get stuff done. We talk about:
- The evolution of 37Signals – and why where you start is not where you finish
- The value of introducing “done enough” as a measure of success
- The problem with meetings – and what to do about it
- Why planning is highly overrated
- And a bunch more…
You can pick up the new book on Amazon , follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonFried, and learn more about 37 Signals’ products at their website.
(And by the way, Jason’s surname is pronounced “Freed” – Apologies to Jason, and please ignore my mistake at the start of the interview!)
Posted on March 9, 2010
Roger Martin who is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management here in Toronto and the author of three great books on business. The first is The Responsibility Virus which talks about the power of building true partnerships. The second is The Opposable Mind which talks about ‘integrative thinking’ and his most recent is The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage.
In this interview we take on:
- The journey ideas take – from ‘mystery’ to ‘heuristic’ to ‘algorithm’
- Why ‘design thinking’ could be considered a counter-cultural act
- How the beginning of change lies in changing the way we think
- Why the burden of proof can be impossible to meet (and what the implications of that might be)
- The power of projectization – and a company that’s showing just how powerful that can be.
You can find out more about Roger and his work and get access to a range of great material at www.RogerLMartin.com.
Posted on January 21, 2010
