A Wealth of Ideas

Don’t let them go fallow.

There’s a precious business asset that is ultimately responsible for all success. It costs nothing to own, so it’s present at every startup. Amazingly, though, some businesses stop using it. They let it go fallow, forgotten.

We’re speaking of creativity, the art of ideas.

You were creative when you went into business. You must have been. You must have devised something new and untested. You thought of a new way of delivering services, or an innovative way to sell a product.

Which is laudable, of course. But how creative were you today? How creative will you be next week? You’re not sitting back and letting your earliest ideas define your future, are you?

The most creative companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and others — constantly innovate because they encourage their people to constantly create. Many set aside up to 20% of their employees’ time to work on emerging ideas. A lot of those ideas, maybe even most, go nowhere. But there’s brilliance enough in the rest to make the exercise worthwhile.

We said creativity costs nothing to own, and that’s true (hint: you were born with it, as was everyone you know). That doesn’t mean it’s free to nurture, though. It takes time and care and a loving environment. It’s rather skittish. Demand it to come forth and it’ll run and hide. Be gentle and inviting and it’ll trot right up and feed from your hand.

There’s creativity permeating your organization. Everyone for whom you sign a paycheck is teeming with ideas, ideas that have the potential of catapulting your success.

All you have to do is let it happen.

The C4:

1. Creativity was the founding asset of every business, and it’s the cause of every future success. Some businesses forget this at their peril, thinking that first good idea was all they’ll ever need. That’s folly.
2. Smart businesses realize that a constantly changing world calls for constant new ideas. They foster creativity as a way of eternally reinventing themselves.
3. Creativity is free, but harnessing it for business success takes investment. Invest in the time and environment needed for a free flow of ideas, and those ideas will greatly repay you.
4. Creativity abounds. You’re a font of ideas, so are your managers and entry-levels. So is the guy who cleans the floor. There’s a wealth of this resource all around you. Harvest it.

Best Buy (Before It’s Too Late)

Big losses alter course for big box retailer.

Are the days of big-box retailing coming to an end? Best Buy fears they might be.

Best Buy is moving to reverse their thus-far unprofitable year (they’ve reported a loss of nearly $2 billion in the quarter ending March 3) by shuttering 50 stores between now and the end of 2013.

But they’re not stopping there. Best Buy has studied the dynamics of their loss and concluded that the ways consumers buy electronics have irrevocably shifted. The big-box model, which is in large part how Best Buy has always done business, just isn’t working anymore. Online retailers offer a wider range of big-ticket items (plasma TVs, computers, game consoles) at prices with which the brick-and-mortar sellers — especially ones with big-box rent to pay — simply can’t compete.

So what do you do when your business model crumbles before your eyes? You can give up, of course. Or you can innovate. You can — pardon the pun — think outside the box.

Best Buy is trying a two-pronged approach. Think of them as dueling experiments. First, they’re inaugurating so-called “Connected Stores,” a sort of big-box lite, averaging about 20% smaller in terms square footage and designed with an emphasis on customer service and speedy shopping. Second, they’ll be opening a chain of much smaller outlets concentrating almost exclusively on mobile products. In both cases, and with the surviving big-boxes, they’ll be beefing up loyalty programs and offering free shipping wherever applicable.

Their solutions are yet unproven. Best Buy might yet go the way of Circuit City (remember them?) but they’ll not go down without a fight. They’re fighting the best way a business can: with innovation. Hats off to that.

The C4:

1. In Q4 2011 (which ended March 3, 2012), Best Buy suffered losses of $1.7 billion, or $4.89 per share.
2. In response, the company is moving to close 50 stores, eliminate an additional 400 corporate jobs and cut around $800 million in costs before the end of 2013.
3. They’re also trying to shake up their business model, by testing alternatives to their traditional big-box approach, and with an increased emphasis on customer service.
4. Win or lose, and with all respect to those about to lose their jobs, Best Buy deserves respect for trying to innovate their way back to success.

Indies v. Old Hands

You can't always tell a book by its, ummm, format.

One of the most interesting emerging markets — emerging in the form of a deluge, that is — is ebooks. Kindle is king, but Amazon’s competitors (Nook, Kobo, etc.) contribute a healthy percentage of global sales, which will probably top a quarter billion units moved this year.

The interesting bit is the number of those units published by absolute independents (indies): content creators as editors, designers and Amazon-partnered media moguls.

That means a lot of dross gets in, but it isn’t all dross. The top-performing indies — Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath and Scott Nicholson among others — are completely outperforming the publishing powerhouses.

Traditional publishing is lost at sea with ebooks. They’re pricing them wrong, formatting them poorly and marketing them not at all. The best indies have mastered formatting, have found the sweet spot of pricing (.99 to 4.99), and are marketing like the self-interested creative types they are.

And they're cleaning up.

What comes next will be driven by technology, by the inventiveness of indies and by whether or not the traditionals get competitive. They could crush the indies if they simply dumped their entire backlists into the .99 e-bin.

Conversely, indies will probably better ride the next wave of innovation. The potentials are limitless. F'rinstance, since most ebooks are read on tablets, what’s stopping publishers from inserting video into ebooks?

And who sounds more likely to try that? The indie or the old hand?

The C4:

1. Ebook sales are huge and growing, with over 115,000,000 units sold by Amazon alone last year. 
2. Direct electronic publishing technology means we're all potential ebook sellers. 
3. The market is straining under this flood.
4. Motivated independents are seizing their opportunities and outperforming all competition — including the powerhouse New York book publishers.