• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel wrote an excellent article for BusinessWeek, “Innovation’s Accidental Enemies.” They suggest an alternate path to the two defaults we typically choose when it comes to filtering new ideas.

When faced with a new idea, the boardroom impulse is to ask for proof in one of two flavors: deductive and inductive. With deduction, we apply a widely held rule. With induction, we develop a new rule from a wide range of data. In both cases, we use existing information to understand the issue in play. But for breakthroughs, there is no rule or pool of past data to provide certainty.

Instead of using deductive and inductive logic to reason with a new idea, the authors suggest a third form: abductive logic.

Instead, when facing an anomalous situation, we can turn to a third form of logic: abductive logic, the logic of what could be. To use abduction, we need to creatively assemble the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference—a logical leap—to the best possible conclusion.

In other words, abductive logic suggests we focus less on what we know and more on what we don’t. “Asking what could be true—and jumping into the unknown—is critical to innovation. Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part.”

“Might the future of business lie in encouraging shoulds rather than indulging wants? Could corporations help us bring out our better selves?”

As usual, Dan Heath and Chip Heath have a great column in the April 2009 issue of Fast Company. They write about why customers will pay to restrain themselves.

Think about a piggy bank, which is like a security system for a world where you’re the burglar. In purchasing a piggy, you’re paying $10 to protect $22 in spare change from your own hands. Life is full of piggy-bank situations, where we crave restrictions on our own behavior. Might your business benefit from helping your customers handcuff themselves?

From watching television while running the treadmill to the Antabuse pill used by alcoholics to make you sick when you drink, “All of us seek ways to save ourselves from our own weaknesses,” say the authors.

Time’s Michael Grunwald echoes this thinking in his April 13 article. Grunwald successfully argues how the Obama team is using the science of change and behavioral economics to fundamentally alter the way we live. Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, is “obsessed with behavioral economics.” Orszag took part in a recent marathon and, to ensure he finished, he setup a significant automatic donation to a charity he did not like in the event he did not cross the finish line.

It’s interesting to think how businesses could leverage this way of thinking. The Heath brothers have a few examples of their own, as does Grunwald’s article.

Fortune senior writer Jennifer Reingold has a great interview with Jim Collins on how companies can turn crisis into opportunity.

When asked how companies who are built to last get through tough times, Collins says “you have to have moorings.” In other words, your stability and security is directly related to “an incredible fabric of values, of underlying ideals or principles.”

Collins goes on to suggest that in times of crisis, it’s the caliber of your people that will get you through. The question isn’t how can we afford to attain or retain the best, it’s how can we afford not to?

When asked how to distinguish truly great talent, Collins says, “The right people don’t need to be managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.”

The right people don’t think they have a job: They have responsibilities. If I’m a climber, my job is not [just] to belay. My responsibility is that if we get in trouble, I don’t let my partner down. The right people do what they say they will do, which means being really careful about what they say they will do. It’s key in difficult times. In difficult environments our results are our responsibility. People who take credit in good times and blame external forces in bad times do not deserve to lead. End of story.

The full interview is a quick read and full of good to great wisdom.

Because my wife is an adjunct philosophy professor, I may have a particular appreciation for the subject of “wisdom.” The word “philosophy” means the love of wisdom, so it was no surprise that we enjoyed Barry Schwartz’s TED talk from earlier this month. Wow.

Schwartz studies the relationship between economics and psychology, and his topic at TED was on the loss of wisdom. In this 20-minute talk, he opens with the lack of humanity found in a job description for a hospital janitor. He quickly moves into the inherent conflict of responsibility and incentive, and how both are at war, in the words of Aristotle, with our moral and social will.

A wise person:

• Knows when and how to make the exception to every rule.
• Knows when and how to improvise
• Knows how to use these more skills in pursuit of the right aims.
• Is made and not born.

Experience the talk now.

His nickname is Dr. Doom, but Nouriel Roubini is someone I’m adding to my list of people to pay attention to. He was making predictions about a U.S. economic collapse while the rest of us would hear nothing of it. He blogs regularly and is getting more and more press lately, including Newsweek and BusinessWeek. This makes sense because so much of what Nouriel has been warning us of is happening.

His latest forecast for 2009 is bleak, suggesting “that the U.S. economy is only half way through a recession that will be the longest and most severe in the post war period.”

Maybe I’m late to the game or maybe I’m paying too much attention to random patterns, but I’ve been coming across the name, face and wisdom of Meredith Whitney a lot lately. She’s the managing director of Oppenheimer and has been referred to as the most important woman in business. From what I’ve read about her and seen from her, Meredith is definitely someone I am adding to my radar of people to watch. A recent BusinessWeek interview offers a great snapshot of Meredith and her perspective.

One of my younger brothers sent me his résumé earlier this week. He wanted me to look it over and help sharpen it up a bit. He’s been working the same job for the past several years and has moved up in title and responsibility, but he’s just not feeling his stride. He lives in New York City and is a lethal mix of creativity and dependability. Those two strengths are not often found in the same person, but for my brother, he’s got it. His challenge is getting that message across to potential employers.

A one-page résumé has got to be one of the worst methods ever invented for being able to show who you are, what you’re made of, and why someone should hire you.

For the most part, I’m convinced that employers want to see passion and then profession. I want to work with people that want to work with me. If someone is just looking for a job, I’m not interested. But if you’re looking for a place to grow, a place to bring your A-game, a place to collaborate with others and move closer to world domination, I want to talk.

A résumé is not going to do all of this for job seekers. I suggest you spend less of your time cleaning up your past and instead focus on getting the attention of your next employer. Consider:

• Jumping out of a cake

• Posting a video appeal on YouTube
• Writing a song about you and the new company
• Have ten friends hand-write a letter suggesting you
• Send a link to a mock-up of how you’d design things
• Hold a sign outside as people enter the office in the morning

This is not about gimmicks or being obnoxious. This about connecting the passion you have to work there with the passion they have to find the right people.

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend a one-day course taught by former Yale and Princeton professor Edward Tufte. The New York Times calls him “The Leonardo da Vinci of data.”

Although the seminar itself was a little underwhelming, the content was great. And because Tufte’s main point is that content is all that matters, it kind of works for him. You gotta give him some credit for getting 300 people paying $380 for a one-day lecture that he’ll do 16 times around the country in the next few months. And he’s been doing this for years. Cha-ching.

The four books he wrote—included with registration—are really all you need. Tufte spent the majority of his time reading and referring to them anyway.

Visual Explanations

Envisioning Information

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Beautiful Evidence

A few highlights for me:

• In good data presentations, nothing should be able to be erased. In other words, eliminate non-relevant information that doesn’t support your point.

• At the same time, include as much information as possible to support your data. Every presentation of data should provide reasons to believe. Your audience isn’t dumb.
• If you’re tempted to remove stuff from your presentation because it’s looking too cluttered, it’s a design problem not a content problem. Overcome the clutter with better design.
• Those boxes on org charts (the black lines around people’s names) mean nothing. Eliminate them.
• Presenting data–or any presentation–should not be authoritarian. Your points are not meant to give you power, they’re meant to help educate the audience. Why do we do the slow “reveal” in our presentations? We should send everything we have ahead of time so people can start to get familiar with the content.
• Get people to use their own cognitive flow and style. Genuine exploration. It’s how we learn.
• Anytime you’re making presentations, continually come around to these three questions: 1) What is the problem? 2) Who cares? 3) What’s my solution?
• Find or develop a “super graphic” that you use all the time and continually refer to.
• Don’t pitch. Instead, explain and inform.
• Use whatever it takes to show the data. Three-dimensional objects are the best when you can.
• Put your name on your work. People make presentations, not committees or boards or teams. Individual names lend credit and provide accountability.
• Beware of featureitis, the disease that says more bells and whistles are better.

One of the most impressive examples of a good data presentation is the graphic from Napoleon’s ill-fated Moscow campaign by Mindard. Wow.

For those unfamiliar with Tufte, he hates PowerPoint with a vengeance and is full of reasons why.

I look forward to spending some time with Tufte’s books and digesting more of the information. They’re a gold-mine of wisdom and examples.

I’ve been thinking a lot about simple succinct communication that gets the point across clearly and quickly. I don’t know about you, but I am overwhelmed at the amount of stuff (books, magazines, blogs, brands, emails, phone calls, ads, etc.) that seeks my attention. It’s no wonder that when communication is short and sweet, my capacity for comprehension and commitment is increased.

My team often pokes fun at my 2-3 word email replies. “Go. BA” is a regular response to many incoming emails. “Looks good. BA” and “Please handle. BA” are also repeated replies.

Keeping Twitter current has been a great lesson for me in capturing the big idea in as few words as possible (140 characters or less to be exact).

At the Webby Awards this year, all acceptance speeches were limited to five words or less. Brilliant.

Kevin Hendricks wrote a great post about Apple’s genius ability to say things succinctly with the latest iPhone announcement.

What’s your point already?

Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a column in the January/February 2007 issue of Business 2.0 entitled “The Agony of Victory.” He makes the argument for why the greatest peril for a company is often its own success. Pfeffer suggests three strategies to help companies avoid “competency traps.”

1. Avoid excessive specialization
Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Diversify service offerings. Make sure your assembly line isn’t setup to make just one type of vehicle.

2. Develop peripheral vision
Pay attention to the facts. Get a little paranoid. Don’t focus on what you want to happen, focus on what is happening.

3. Foster an environment of learning and vigilance
Your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness. Understanding that, get your mind set accordingly.