Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others

Murray, David Kord

ISBN 10: 1441801405 ISBN 13: 9781441801401

Publisher: Brilliance Audio, 2009

Synopsis

There is no such thing as a truly original idea. Admit it, you’ve borrowed an idea before: from a competitor, a coworker, or the kid sitting next to you in the fifth grade. Borrowing Brilliance is a controversial, “big think” audiobook, challenging our notions of intellectual property and authorship, and exploring the evolution of a creative idea. Creative ideas were once the territory of the entrepreneur, the marketing department, and the advertising agency, but now they are the responsibility of every employee within a company. A new business discipline is emerging—“innovation” is now a department in many creative companies, tasked with generating new ideas. Murray knows because he was the head of innovation for the Fortune 500 software company Intuit. He was charged with teaching “creativity” to the members of the company. And that’s where his “borrowing brilliance” program originated. Most people believe creativity is a gift; that it can’t be taught; that it’s innate in your thinking process, and either you have it or you don’t. But Murray lifts the veil off the creative process, bringing it from the shadows of the subconscious mind into the conscious world. Creativity is not the result of divine intervention; it is something that can be learned and it is easily within reach.

About this title

About the Author:

David Kord Murray began his career as an aerospace engineer working on the conceptual development team for the International Space Station. He has also been an entrepreneur, inventor, and Fortune 500 executive. He was the head of innovation for the software company Intuit and held similar positions at other Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Tahoe City, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Honor Among Thieves

Traveling back in time twenty- five years, I find myself sitting in a waiting room. I recognize it as the Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts and I recognize myself as a young man with a full head of hair waiting for my friend Sarkis Kojabashian. I call him “Tuna” because his name sounds like “Starkist,” the company that sells canned tuna fish, and because I have no idea what a “Sarkis” is. He works at the hospital and I’ve come to pick him up so we can drive to Cape Cod for the weekend.

Tuna had told me this was called the Westborough State Colony for the Criminally Insane when it opened a hundred years ago. Then it was renamed the Westborough State Insane Asylum. Next it was called the Westborough State Mental Hospital and now it was more cryptically known as the Westborough State Hospital. It smells of medicinal alcohol, damp linens, and dried piss. It gives me the creeps and I hate to think of my friend spending time in here. Sarkis wants to become a psychiatrist and he’s working as an orderly to get experience and college credits. A bad idea, I think.

Across from me sits a frail, thin man, middle- aged and dressed in a green hospital- issued smock, like a doctor or surgeon wears. He isn’t acknowledging me and doesn’t seem to care I’m in the room. He rocks back and forth, mumbling something. I am certain he isn’t a doctor. I struggle to hear what he’s saying, but can’t. He chants to himself, the same thing, over and over.

Where the hell is Tuna? I think. I want to get out of this place. I listen. Now I can make it out, barely, now I am certain what he’s saying.

He wants something.

“I gotta get a gun,” he mumbles. Oh, that’s just great, I think. Tuna leaves me in here with a psychotic killer, a leftover from the colony for the criminally insane. This guy’s going to pull out a Smith & Wesson from under his smock or attack me with a homemade shank.

“I gotta get a gun. I gotta get a gun,” he repeats, faster, louder and more desperately. “I gotta get a gun.”

Just then Tuna bursts into the room. “Hey, Murray! How the hell are ya?” he says as he smothers me in a bear hug. I push him away, pissed off, and motion toward the would-be assassin.

“Get me the hell out of here,” I say.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“What’d ya think?” I say as we walk out to the safety of the corridor.

“Oh, you aren’t scared of Billy, now, are you?” he asks.

“That guy’s nuts.”

“No shit. Where do you think you are?” he replies.

Down the hall, faintly, I hear, “I gotta get a gun. I gotta get a gun.”

I say to Sarkis, “He’s dangerous. He keeps saying that he’s going to get a gun.”

Tuna laughs and says, “He isn’t saying he’s gonna get a ‘gun.’ He’s saying he’s gotta get some ‘gum.’ Something to chew on, Murray, not something to blow your brains out with.” In the car on the way to the Cape, Sarkis tells me that Billy was admitted to the hospital two years ago. Sadly, he’s been saying he needs “gum” over and over for most of that time. As Sarkis understands it, he lost his life savings in a bad business deal, double crossed by his partner, and now finds himself in a dank room, hidden in a mental hospital in an obscure part of New England. Every day Tuna gives him a pack of gum, Juicy Fruit, Big Red, and even Bubblicious, but every day he just repeats the request, over and over, even as he chews away.

Go figure, right?

***

Twenty- five years later, hidden in Tempe, Arizona, I can’t help but think of Billy and wonder if he ever pulled out of it. Did he ever stop repeating himself? Did he ever escape from Westborough?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I never will. I do, however, start to wonder about my own sanity. While I’m not incessantly chanting for chewing gum, repetitive thoughts are echoing in my mind, and even though I’m thousands of miles away, I wonder how close I am to being admitted to Westborough. To joining Billy.

I’m consulting for another leasing company, hired to create new ideas. The only problem is, all the ideas I create are just rehashed ones from my glory days. Nothing new. I’m known by my colleagues as an “idea guy,” but now every time I sit down to think of one, I keep coming back to Preferred Capital. My thoughts are repetitive, like Billy’s, trapped in the past, in a canyon of thought I can’t escape. I need some new ones.

I begin to read. Voraciously. The little money I have is being spent on vodka, cranberry juice, and books. I’m reading more than two a week. Books on innovation and creativity. Business books. Books on psychology and philosophy. Science books. Books on neurology and biology. Anything that can help to get the creative juices flowing again. The books seem to work. The vodka does not.

Over the next couple of years I manage to think my way out of the one- bedroom apartment in Tempe and begin a journey out of bankruptcy and into a completely new occupation. I start a small consulting company called Kord Marketing Group, a reference to my mother’s maiden name and my middle name, and begin developing new marketing programs for small, medium, and even large companies.

Within a year, I get the opportunity to consult for one of the most prominent software companies in Silicon Valley. While there I come up with an innovative direct- marketing program that dramatically increases retention rates, boosts revenues by fifty million dollars, and adds similar bottom-line profits to the company. In retrospect, the idea would seem so simple and so obvious that the senior managers would scratch their heads and ask, “Why didn’t we think of that before?” The founder of the company, a veteran of the Silicon Valley software wars and one of the few to beat Bill Gates at his own game, would find himself more intrigued to know how I came up with the idea than with the idea itself.

“How’d you think of it?” he asked me.

I explained to him how I’d studied his business problem and then looked at how other companies in other marketplaces had solved a similar problem. Then I had constructed the new direct- marketing program out of the borrowed ideas from these other places. It wasn’t hard. Once I had the material, it was obvious which pieces would best combine to solve the problem I had defined.

“Cool,” he said. He was so impressed by the simplicity of the idea and how I’d come up with it that he created a new position at the company for me. I became the Head of Innovation, a position I hadn’t even known existed at Fortune 500 companies, and I was told to come up with new ideas and to teach others in the company to do the same. It was this assignment that led to the book you now hold in your hands.

At first, I was intimidated by my new position. How do you teach people to innovate? Is it even possible? I started to study innovative thinking. As an engineer by training, I was looking for a practical approach to innovation, but everything I read seemed to be shrouded in a fog of mystery. On the other hand, my personal approach to creative thinking was pretty much hack, I just stole or borrowed ideas from other places. In my new position I’d have to develop a more sophisticated approach—or so I thought.

I found that most people believed that creativity was a gift. It can’t be taught, they said, it’s innate in your thinking process. Either you had it or you didn’t. The more I delved, the thicker the fog around creative thinking became. As a subject, innovation was bizarre. The ones who did teach it used words like synthesis, lateral thinking, empathy, and pattern recognition to describe it. I didn’t want to say so outright, but I had no clue what these experts were talking about. I didn’t understand—­it was over my head. I learned how to moderate a brainstorming session by suspending the criticism of new ideas but quickly realized this was a complete waste of time. The sessions were fun and intellectually intriguing but nothing practical ever came out of them. The more I learned about innovation the deeper into the fog I ventured.

I studied the work of Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School. She is one of the country’s foremost experts on business innovation and she said, “All innovation begins with creative ideas.” Okay, I said to myself, that makes sense, but how do you define a creative idea? What is it? Over time I came up with this simple explanation:

A creative idea is one that’s new and useful. A new idea that isn’t useful, I reasoned, isn’t worth much in the business world. I could design a car with square wheels, it would be new and different, but it wouldn’t be of much use. Later I’d come to realize that this definition transcended business, for it also applied to science, entertainment, and even the arts.

I continued down this thinking path and asked myself two separate questions. What makes an idea useful? And what makes an idea new? The first question was easy to answer. Since ideas are the solutions to problems, it’s your definition of the problem that makes it useful. Solve an important one and you’ve got a useful idea. Right? The second question, however, was a little more difficult to answer.

To figure it out, I began to study ideas. I looked at my own ideas, the ideas of my colleagues, and the ideas of others in business, s...

About this edition

• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1441801405
• ISBN 13: 9781441801401
• Binding: Audio CD