The first step in thinking differently is finding a sense of curiosity. You can’t think different if you’re not willing to learn, and you can’t learn if you lack the curiosity to do so. Brands and retailers should stop assuming they know what customers want. They don’t. But they can have the curiosity to engage with customers and ask them. Learn what they want.
The second step to thinking differently is gaining a broad set of experiences. Leonardo da Vinci was primarily interested in science and engineering. He was a reluctant artist at best. Yet it was the experience and knowledge he gained from dissecting more than 30 bodies that allowed him to paint Mona Lisa’s smile.
As a brand or retailer, you don’t necessarily have to seek outsiders with different experiences to add value to the whole. Encourage everyone in the company to pursue a life well lived. After all, a life well lived brings a bounty of rewards to everyone. No one has done well living under a rock. Equally as important to encouraging your teams to gain outside experiences, you absolutely must seek diversity of people and thought. Mix it up. There is no room for a lack of diversity by race, gender, age, and education. Likewise mix up your teams. Design should live no more in a bubble than finance.
The third step toward thinking differently is compassion. There’s an old saying that you can’t argue with stupid. Well I have come to learn that that’s a stupid thing to say. It’s not that other people are stupid. They may not have gained the comfort or capacity to appreciate steps one and two herein. Encourage them to do so. But let them do so on their terms. More likely than not though, their curiosity and experiences have provided them a different lens by which to think differently, from you. This, by the way, is where the magic happens. It’s called collaboration.
When all of us are curious, and when all of us seek different experiences, it’s leads us to the sharing of information and knowledge. You can’t grow if you don’t learn and share. Likewise your brand can’t grow if doesn’t stimulate curiosity and collaboration among many points of view from a diverse set of people who are hungry for learning and excited for experiences.
There’s a seismic difference between gross sales and net sales for a wholesale brand. It’s called discounts and allowances.
Managers enable fear. In some cases it’s intentional, but more often than not it’s completely unintentional. Enabling fear is often a condition that happens when people and teams are focused on extrinsic values like targets, bonuses, and promotions. Focusing on things that are often out of our control creates bad habits and frustrating work conditions. Worse of all, fear is what keeps people from growing and learning. It’s fear that prevents us from sticking our necks out and doing big things. Its fear that keeps us from walking down untrodden paths to find new destinations or opportunities. I’m a lot more comfortable walking the streets of NYC then the deep trails of Colorado. But fear doesn’t stop me from loading my backpack and hitting the those trails–usually.
Engineers build things to solve problems. They filter through effects to find causes so problems can be solved and lives can be happier. More importantly engineers speak up when they see something that’s deeply broken. We should all be engineers.
So many companies talk about how they are becoming more and more data driven. While I think that’s a good thing, I also think it could also be a very dangerous thing.