4 Good Rules to build Kick Ass Ideas

Fast Company has an article by KAIHAN KRIPPENDORFF on 4 steps to breakthrough ideas.  These are good rules to use when you want to kick ass on your competitors and build solutions that they have a hard time copying.  Here are the 4 four rules.

Step 1: Change the question

Step 2: Find a new metaphor

Step 3: Reuse what you have

Step 4: Perform a quick and dirty test

The article is short, and finishes reiterating the 4 points.

Ask yourself:

1. If you reversed the question you have been asking for the past few weeks, what question would you end up with?

2. What metaphor is your competitor using and what alternative metaphor could you battle them with?

3. What can you reuse from your current (or past) business to create something new?

4. What quick and dirty test can you perform to test the viability of the idea you created through steps 1-3?

There are a few people in the data center industry who use this approach, and these are some of the funnest most interesting people to talk to.

Kaihan has a web site http://www.kaihan.net/index.html and a Book on Outthink the Competition.

Worse Power Outages in the World

National Geographic has a nice article with the largest power outages is the world.

Pictures: World’s Worst Power Outages

Northeastern U.S. and Canada, 1965

Photograph by Bob Gomel, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

A full moon created an eerie skyline silhouette after New York City went dark during the blackout of November 1965. In a world that's increasingly dependent on constant power, massive electrical outages are a common concern and may strike systems across the globe.

Gets you thinking about how the local data centers weathered the outages.

Restoration Disaster draws attention to unknown artist, Data Center outages (disasters) do the same

The Guardian makes the point that the  news about the failed restoration actually draws attention to art.

It's all over the internet, it's trending, tweeting, the funniest art joke of all time. You must know it by now. "Masterpiece of Jesus is destroyed after old lady's attempt to restore damage is a less-than-divine intervention",Worst painting restoration work in history", "Elderly woman destroys 19th century fresco with DIY restoration".

The author makes the point that this woman should be turned loose on more art.

Similarly, the well-meaning restorer of this obscure Spanish painting should be turned loose on a couple of works that actually matter. Many true masterpieces are starved of the global attention this second-rate Ecce Homo has now got. She could be sent to Italy to see what she can do with the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. Revered by art historians, these paintings of the months of the year have never quite made it into popular culture. There are 12 paintings, one for every month, so one could be sacrificed for the good of the whole. A hideously repainted face on one of the lesser months might make their creator the 15th-century genius Francesco del Cossa as famous as the 19th century mediocrity Elias Garcia Martinez has now become.

Most of the time data centers aren't big deals.  The exception being Apple data centers.  Apple can build a 100kW data center shed and the news would cover it.

What will draw attention though to a data center is an outage, and just like the woman who somehow thought they were making things better, how many data centers fail when someone was trying fix something.

How did it happen? What was the well-meaning vandal thinking? Reports differ on the meaning of the middle picture in the before-and-after triptych: was this the result of water damage or the self-appointed artist's early effort to prepare the picture for restoration? Picturing how it happened is even funnier than seeing the contrasting versions themselves. Did she, like the Marx Brothers trimming a moustache in Monkey Business, try to fix one bit and then had to do another bit and then another until the whole thing was gone? Was it like Father Ted in the episode of the much-loved clerical comedy where he attempts tomend a car's bodywork with a hammer?

Creative Environments work better with climate control vs. command and control approach

There is a post about Sir Ken Robinsont on Google's Think Quarterly.  Here is one of key quotes highlighted.

“You want to free up the abilities of everybody to contribute ideas, because everybody has ideas, and you need to create a climate in which that will happen. The role of a creative leader is not ‘command and control’, it’s more like ‘climate control’.”

This quote is in this paragraph.

But on whose shoulders does it fall to get the balance right? Is creativity fostered from the top down? “There are some things we know about leadership which tend to inhibit creative thinking,” says Robinson. “Leaders can perpetuate problems when they try and control everything and remove the discretion of people in their organisation. What you want to do is free up the abilities of everybody to contribute ideas, because everybody has ideas, and you need to create a climate in which that will happen. The role of a creative leader is not ‘command and control’, it’s more like ‘climate control’. You create a culture.”

The coolest data centers are ones that are run by people who think this way.  I am way more impressed by the people than the size of a data center or its energy efficiency.  Why?  Because it is easy to make a data center look pretty.  And, you find out what is really going on by talking to the people.

I am trying to find the time to read Sir Ken Robinson's book.

Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative [Hardcover]

Three Rules for a Successful Company in Silicon Valley - not noticed, proven with $5mil, and survive onslaught of incumbents

TechCrunch and others covered David O Sacks, CEO of Yammer's post on three things that make it hard to create a successful company in silicon valley.

David O Sacks

Saturday via mobile

I think silicon valley as we know it may be coming to an end. In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that (1) has escaped the attention of the major Internet companies, which are better run than ever before; (2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5M, the typical seed plus series A investment; and (3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you're onto. How many ideas like that are left?

You can see the original Facebook post which is public.

David's main point is not that there are a shortage of ideas, but how hard it is create a company.

David O Sacks Human creativity has not changed, and there will always be new ideas and opportunities. But the question is, how many of those opportunities will be captured by startups versus incumbents? It seems like a statistical fact that when you go from virtually no incumbents to multiple well-run incumbents, an increasing percentage of opportunities will be captured by the latter. That's the point I'm making about Silicon Valley -- we may not be running out of ideas, but we might be running out of big new companies.

Saturday at 11:52am via mobile · Like · 5

One of the problems is if your company is in Silicon Valley you are surrounded by your competitors.  Staying under the radar, yet proving you have a sound revenue model, and the big guys won't crush you is really really hard. I grew up and spent my first 12 years working for HP and Apple in Cupertino and you learned to keep your mouth shut and not talk shop when you were outside of work.  

I do agree with David and I wouldn't build a successful new company in silicon valley.  The easiest way to achieve success is not to tell the VC community what the new company is.  But, then it is hard to get the $5mil of funding.