Laura’s Winning Ideas

Tom Peters once said, “Hire a few genuine off-the-wall sorts – collect some weirdos. Curious and the occasional gap in the resume are not enough. We need some real kooks. If we want original products, they’re likely to come from original people.”

Today I visited the website of Alex Tew:
www.milliondollarhomepage.com

Alex is a young fellow in the UK, broke and on his way to college. He posted a homepage, selling click-through ad space by the pixel. His commitment was that he would keep the page live for at least five years, and close the site when (if) he reached $1 million dollars.

That nutty idea launched on the last friday in August, with a few ads he sold to friends and family. By the end of September he had enough to pay for college. By the end of November, he’d sold over $700,000.00.

Viral marketing led to huge gains in viewers, which led to more sales, which attracted media attention, which put him on whirlwind publicity trips throughout Europe and the US. All the attention has paid off for his advertisers with outstanding gains in traffic driven to their own sites.

“Weed out the dullards, nurture the nuts.” – Tom Peters

Who in your organization might be capable of the same innovation? How fast would they be stifled from trying it out? Is there any safe space for these folks in your organization?

In the 1970’s, Hewlett Packard created Skunkworks to protect new ideas from the bureaucracy.

In the 1980’s, 3M learned their lesson after post-it notes became their most profitable business. Renegade researchers had tricked senior management into paying attention to post-it notes by supplying their support staff with samples and then denying a replacement supply.

Today, the barriers to entry are low for technology innovation. Many of these flakes will go out and start up companies like eBay and Amazon.com. How will you stem the brain drain?

Who in your organization needs to know that originality and creative strange ideas need to be permitted? How will you tell them? And When?