Tag: ideas

  • 5 Ways to Make Soccer More Exciting for Television

    Photo by adem80 via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Yada. Yada. Yada. There are those who think that soccer is an amazing game for watching on television. But for the other 95.7% of Americans I have five ideas for making it more palatable to the American market.

    1. Make goals worth 7 points. We get that. A game that ends in 1-0 seems pointless. But a game that is 7-0 seems like a defensive battle. But not nearly as good as a 42-35 throw down.
    2. Every time a team scores a goal, they lose a player. With fewer players on the better teams that gives the poorer teams the chance to score more often. That means that the more goals that are scored, the fewer players on the field, and more opportunities to score. Another alternative would be to substitute a small child for a player each time a team scores a goal. About 6 years old seems right.
    3. Add a little hill near the middle line and get rid of the offsides rule. Make the hill reasonable… but it’s important that there is a sightline issue so that a hidden forward can lay low enough to cherry pick for an easy shot on goal.
    4. If a game goes to overtime add an additional ball every five minutes. I don’t mind the idea of playing an extra period. I just don’t want to watch a bunch of tired guys pass it around and wait for a shootout. If it’s still tied inside of 5 minutes in overtime, both managers get to play too.
    5. Eliminate the red card and substitute in a penalty box. All of the weenie flopping is hard to stomach. If there’s a hard foul, give the offender a 5 minute timeout. Americans love the aggressiveness of hockey. But the acting on display at the World Cup reminded us of a soap opera.

    These are my ideas for making soccer more interesting.

    What are yours?

  • Innovating with an established ecosystem

    Photo by fmgbain via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Starting a new organization is an entirely different task than innovating to change an existing organization.

    Both are hard. But changing and existing organization is way harder.

    For most of my career I’ve been in turnaround roles. Kristen and I have a little joke… My entire adult work life has seemed like one roller coaster ride after another.

    Click, click, click, click… up we climb.

    Click, click, click, click. My heart races.

    Wait for it. Wait for it… Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

    Arms up. Screaming bloody murder. Thinking of the Tom Petty song, Free Falling.

    Down the big hill we go.

    Over and over again I’m left to help try to innovate our way out of the mess.

    And, so far, I’ve been pretty successful at it by most people’s judgement.

    How does one innovate within an existing ecosystem?

    1. Become Switzerland. There are political factions within any organization. If you want to get stuff done you need to be neither and empathetic both sides at the same time.
    2. Spike the football. When you do something that everyone is happy with its OK to just look into the camera and say, “Thank you very much. Woohoo! Hi mom!” I’ve seen a lot of people fail in an organization because they were afraid to take the credit for their own ideas doing well. Don’t be an idiot. It’s OK to be the guy to do good stuff. Spike the football.
    3. Own the data. Existing organizations are horrible at owning their data. I like to look at the results of a long-standing program that has had no results and say, “30 years of VBS and not a single new family? Why didn’t we just light that $300,000 on fire? At least we would have had a good BBQ.” When people are tied to tradition or the way they’ve always done things, sometimes you need to be the person with the frying pan who hits them in the head. Helping people in leadership own the data is the catalyst to getting stuff done in an existing organization.
    4. Be creative. Face it. A fist full of money and a fat belly has never created a single good idea. Have you seen Bing? No budget, no time, no research, shot in the dark… that’s when good stuff happens. That’s when the best ideas pop into your head. Creativity and innovation come out of suffering and frustration. These are your friends and allies, not your enemies.
    5. Opportunistic eyes. I keep a list of ideas I’ve got on ice. Then, when I’m in a meeting and everyone is scratching their heads looking for something new, bam… I’m pull out my concept. If I ran around screaming about every idea I had all the time I’d look like a mad scientist.

    What are some ways you’ve learned to innovate within an existing ecosystem?

  • Possessed

    Clay High School, 1992 | Welcome to the wayback machine

    When someone pitches an idea my mind is running through a matrix of questions. Is this really a good idea? Is the idea even possible? Is this the right person to turn this idea into a reality? Will enough people buy into the idea that it’ll take off? Is this the right time for this idea?

    But the overarching question on my mind is simply, “Has this idea possessed this person to the point that they won’t rest– they will just be driven by this idea for as long as it takes?”

    90% of the time the answer to that question is no.

    “I can teach anyone enough about music to sing in the  choir.”

    This was the philosophy of my high school choir teacher. The woman was possessed. I’m living proof of this truism. I have no musical ability or talent at all and I was taught enough to perform at hundreds of shows, concerts, and competitions during high school.

    This woman was possessed in her belief that anyone could sing and sing well. She convinced more than 50 students per year to take a choir class at 6:30 AM. On top of that she convinced about 25 of us to take an additional music class in the afternoon. Get this, for three of my four years of high school I had two music classes every day. And after school in the Spring almost all of us were also part of a musical.

    It wasn’t unusual for me to leave for school before 6:00 AM and not return home from school until after 9:00 PM.

    How did she do it? She was possessed by her idea. “I can teach anyone to sing.”

    She had that one magical ingredient that most purveyors of ideas don’t have.

    Do you?

  • Funding the Dream

    vision-dream

    Like any person who comes up with a lot of ideas… I’m used to getting shot down. The pill of reality I swallow every day is that only about 1 in 20 of my ideas are worth seeing to fruition. Thankfully, God has put people with the gift of discernment in my path so I don’t go insane.

    Knowing that– I know this phrase to be true: A vision unfunded is merely a dream.

    A lot of people in my life are learning that their vision is merely a dream. Tough economic times mean that their ministry, their business, their job, or even their early retirement dreams are now unfunded. Grandiose plans usurped by a new need for freelance or part-time work. The people they trusted/hoped/prayed to fund their vision disappointed them.

    Kristen and I are chosing which visions to fund and its hard! We have to look inside ourselves and ask which are dreams (the big house, living abroad) and which are visions worth funding. (our local church, building short/long term savings) Hard choices which reveal what’s really important. As you think of that with a wider lens of millions of people doing the same thing you see why the people in my life are struggling when families like ours our choosing one vision over another. It’s painful to witness.

    What does this all mean? I don’t know for sure. But I do know that even when the funding isn’t there vision, dreams, and big ideas are still worth having. The world won’t change without visionaries and dreamers. Even unfunded ones.

  • Leading to the edges

    ruler-edgeEntrepreneurs get this. Start-up businesses get this. New franchises get this. Church planters get this. But no one in an older business, church, franchise, or industry can comprehend this.

    You have grown your audience as much within what you are doing today as you will ever grow it. You primary demographic already knows about you and has decided whether to be a customer or not. They have decided whether to become a student in your college or not. They have decided whether or not your to attend your church.

    People largely make decisions on your project, widget, consumable, or institution in an instant. Five seconds or less. (Test it yourself, watch TV commercials. How soon until you decide if you are buying that product? I thought so.) Spending more money to advertise the same thing over and over again is just a waste of money. This is why Super Bowl commercials can be deal makers or deal breakers for companies you’ve never heard of.

    This is why marketers dump millions of dollars onto the airwaves and see little return on their investment. This is why church marketing sucks. Once you can identify who your audience is… your best possibility for growth then shifts to customer service and care. Can I keep the customers I have? Can I provide them such an amazing service that they tell their friends that they have to go there, be there, or be your customer?

    Growth comes as you lead your organization towards the edges. When you help your church or college find a new demographic, there is growth. When you design a new product that changes the game for an old industry, there is growth. When you serve a need that everyone wants but no one offers, there is growth.

    What’s the first step in determining how to find my edge?

    Spend time and discover where you are failing. Spend time finding out where everyone in your industry fails. Spend time finding out what churches in your area aren’t doing.

    Hint: Studying successful companies, institutions, churches, or whatever will only lead you away from growth and into their market. Learn from their best practices, for sure, but don’t study them to copy them. Their edge won’t ever be your edge.

  • Responding to Stress

    Here are a few categories of responses to job stress. I think I’ve exhibited them all in the past 3 months.

    – The ostrich: This person looks at the stress at work and just sticks their head into their own work, trying to ignore anything else that goes on. This can be good because at times of high stress there is a need for some people to keep plugging away at work. But it can be bad in that this response can lead to that person working on old priorities and foregoing new priorities.

    – The jackal: This person is the cynic. Generally makes fun of the stressful situation. I think of this as a nervous response to stress. This person tends to have a “sky is falling” type of attitude and veils negativity with humor. But this person will also have every intention of being the person to turn out the lights on the last day. Keep working, keep scavenging, it’ll pay off in the end.

    – The parrot: This person repeats everything. Not so much a gossip, but a person who likes to communicate what the problem and solution is as presented. Both helpful and annoying at the same time, this response seems to be a self-motivating one. But the parrot likes to think it is helping those around it.

    – The bear: This person is all black cloud. They think that today is as good as its going to get. Tomorrow is just another day closer to destruction. This stress response is toxic to a stressful situation because its pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Their Eeyore belief system is not cautious, it is reckless. This person secretly likes stress. Above I said I’ve expressed all of these in the past three months, that’s not true. I refuse to be the bear.

    – The bull: This person sees an opportunity in everything. Relentlessly over-optimistic. This stress response is helpful in times like this because they don’t care about forecasts and the nightmares MSNBC predicts.

    – The honey bee: Similar to the ostrich, this person just shows up and gets the job done. The swarm of activity around doesn’t seem to matter as this person merely concentrates on building the hive and following the orders of the queen bee. Collect pollen, make honey, repeat. If anything the stressful situation makes this person more urgent.

    – The sloth: This person responds to a stressful situation by retreating. They burn up sick and vacation days. They find excuses to avoid dealing with the cause of the stress. Really, this is just a lazy response to stress. This person hopes that while they are checked out the problem will get resolved.

    – The viper: This person just gets mean. Like a snake, they strike out of fear. They feel like if they are mean they can just scare their problems away. Of course, fear is a short term motivator… but this person doesn’t seem to care about that.

    What are some stress responses I’ve missed?

  • Weekly Column Ideas

    Over at Youth Ministry Exchange I’m going to be starting a weekly column. The question is, what should I write about?

    I don’t think it should be just general youth ministry stuff. Let’s face the fact that right now I don’t have a lot of up-to-the-moment experience that is going to be useful.

    For a long time I’ve wanted to do a “Dear Adam” kind of thing where people sent me ministry-related questions and I had fun replying to them. Kind of like Dear Abby for pastors.

    I could do something on adolescent trends. I could do technology stuff. I could do interviews with ministry people.

    But mostly I want to know what you think it should be? Please share your ideas in the comments. My hope is to write a few of these between now and the end of the year so the column can begin the first week of January.