By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 2, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET One of my biggest pet peeves is setting strategy one tactic at a time. It drives me crazy to be surrounded by people and organizations that think if they just work hard enough and do more things that a strategic direction and destination will emerge. It seems that most of the world works this way. It is terribly inefficient. How many people and organizations do you know that pedal the bicycle like crazy but never seem to arrive anywhere. They just keep pedaling harder hoping that something will eventually stick. It is exhausting watching them. Why not determine a destination and work hard on those things that help you get there. It seems so simple. Setting a strategic direction provides a way to know which tactics are aligned and contribute to reaching the destination. The destination may change along the way requiring different tactics, and that is OK, but not having a destination at all is a ticket to nowhere.
When John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon” in 1961, Americans rallied around the destination. We believed it was possible and the goal of setting foot on the moon rallied a country to advance its global science and technology leadership. It was cool to study math and science and clear that innovation was the economic engine that would drive American prosperity. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon eight years later and said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, we celebrated his achievement as if it was our own and knew at that moment that anything was possible. We have been trying to get that feeling back ever since. Today, we have no clear destination, in space or on earth.
 I am still trying to process President Obama’s plan to cancel NASA’s Constellation program for manned space flight back to the moon. OK, I thought, maybe he has a bolder more imaginative space destination in mind or a better way to get back to the moon. It turns out that the announced strategy identifies no new destination at all and has been called a “flexible path” focusing on enabling technologies. The destination will be determined later. Please say it isn’t so. It is impossible to be inspired with out a destination and it is terribly inefficient to develop enabling technologies with out an end in mind.
My second thought upon hearing the new NASA strategy was that maybe President Obama wants to turn our attention and resources toward earth and create an inspiring space mission like focus on fixing health care, education, or climate change. We have no clear destination for any of these huge system challenges. We continue to play around the margins hoping that incremental changes will launch us toward systemic solutions. It isn’t working. We need to transform each of these systems and it will take “moon landing” like clarity and commitment to make it happen. So maybe the president plans to shift attention and resources away from space exploration toward transformation here on earth. No such luck.
It isn’t as if the NASA budget was cut freeing up resources for other priorities. The proposed budget actually increases NASA’s budget by 2% allocating $6B over 5 years to create a commercial taxi to the space station. The budget comes nowhere close to the $3B a year that the recent expert advisory panel suggested was needed to create a robust manned space program. So we appear to be lost in space and on earth. We will continue to invest in space technologies without a clear destination and we will continue to work around the margins of the important system challenges we face here on earth.
It is enough to make you scream. All I can think of is Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners getting angry and red in the face, proclaiming, “To the moon, Alice”!
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 25, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET How many capabilities are locked away, underleveraged in organizational or industry silos? Who hasn’t suffered a severe case of innovator’s envy, coveting access to information and capabilities that seem so tantalizingly close?
Most innovation doesn’t require inventing anything new. It is often just a matter of combining and recombining capabilities across disciplines, organizations, and sectors. The problem is that those capabilities are often impossible to access. The biggest opportunities in health care, education, security, and energy lie in the gray areas between silos. We need to think and act more horizontally.
In doing so, we’ll connect unusual suspects in purposeful ways. Take spies and environmentalists. Recent news of the CIA reviving its MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis) program and providing access to data from national intelligence assets for environmental research really got my attention. What a great example of the power and politics of collaborative innovation.
 More Data Sharing
With no security risk, disruption of agency activities, or incremental cost, the CIA has opened up a treasure trove of valuable data to scientists from academia, government, and industry for environmental research. To replicate the capture of this information would be silly and cost-prohibitive, and I was encouraged that the data were being shared to make progress on an important social issue. But then naysayers and politics entered the conversation. Instead of garnering praise for the program, as I would have expected, the CIA was criticized for mission creep.
Admittedly, news of the collaborative program came right on the heels of the U.S. terror threat on Dec. 25. Talking heads across cable news accused the CIA of negligence, arguing that sharing data with environmental scientists was a distraction from its core mission of minding the American public. But the pundits have it wrong. The CIA and all Homeland Security organizations should be doing more, not less, cross-agency collaboration and data sharing. The protection of data, capabilities, and turf has gotten us into the current mess. Perhaps if the focus had been on networking capabilities and sharing data across silos, America would be a safer country today.
In 1986, the Federal Technology Transfer Act created the CRADA (Cooperative Research & Development Agreement) process to enable public-private partnerships around promising government technologies. CRADA may just as well stand for “Can’t Really Access Developed Assets.” Government rhetoric claims to support technology transfer, but the painful bureaucratic process in place makes it nearly impossible to leverage existing government capabilities. I get a headache just thinking about how hard it is to access all the valuable information and data that have been created by government agencies and paid for by taxpayer dollars. Many of these assets could be leveraged to unleash new value and to help make progress on our big social challenges.
Combining Capabilities
Private-sector organizations are similar. We are so busy pedaling the bicycle of today’s business models that there is no capacity to explore new ones. The secret sauce of business model innovation is the ability to explore new ways to deliver customer value by combining and recombining capabilities, in and out of the organization, across silos.
One story that sticks with me is from my friend Alexander Tsiaris, founder ofAnatomical Travelogue, who has built a successful company creating human anatomy visualization tools to help us better understand health care. When Alexander was starting his digital media business he needed access to hospital MRI equipment. He was willing to pay for access to the equipment during down times to capture the scanned images he transforms into a beautiful art form and health-care education tool. The initial hospitals he asked all said the same thing: We are not in this business and can’t provide access. Alexander is persistent and ultimately found willing partners in New York City, but it wasn’t easy.
This pattern repeats itself over and over. It is not the technology that gets in the way of innovation. It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to experimentation and change. If we want to make progress on the big issues of our time, we have to look up from our silos and become more comfortable recombining capabilities in new ways in order to connect with the unusual suspects.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 18, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET My friend and Boston Globe innovation columnist, Scott Kirsner, has launched an interesting new on-line platform for corporate innovation executives. You will want to check out and subscribe to Innovation Leader where you will find lots of food for innovation thought and where this post originally appeared.
I used to think that if I just yakked long and loud enough, I could convince CEOs to embrace transformational innovation. It took me 25 years as a road warrior consultant, author, and accidental government bureaucrat to realize that proselytizing doesn’t work. If leaders don’t want to change, all the consulting jargon and fancy PowerPoints in the world won’t convince them to.
In those situations, no matter what lofty rhetoric the CEO uses in public or at company retreats about “creating an innovation culture” and encouraging everyone to think outside of the box, the best result you can hope for are incremental innovations to improve the performance of today’s business model. You never get transformational new business models — and you always get frustrated if you were hoping for bolder change. If you want transformational innovation, you have to find leaders who want transformational change and are receptive to organizing differently for tweaks than for transformation. After learning this lesson the hard way over many years, I no longer try to convince CEOs who don’t want to change, and instead try to find those CEO’s who do.
Here’s my list of 10 questions you can ask a CEO to tell if they are really serious about transformational innovation:
1) Do you agree transformational innovation goes beyond breakthrough products to include business model innovation — entirely new ways to create, deliver and capture value?
2) Will your employees tell me that failure is a career-limiting move, or that the company celebrates experimentation?
3) How much time do you spend strengthening and protecting the current business model, versus designing the next one?
4) Do you have clear and discrete objectives for both incremental and transformational innovation? Do you organize differently for each?
5) Does your organization invest in R&D for new business models as it does for new products, services, and technologies?
6) Are you prepared to have your organization disrupt itself? How do you see that playing out?
7) Do internal ideas and projects that threaten to cannibalize the current business model get squashed — or nurtured?
8) Do you have a process for allocating resources for transformational innovation projects that lies outside of the control of business units?
9) Do executives with responsibility for exploring transformational business models report to you, or to another line executive responsible for today’s business?
10) Are you willing to create a sandbox to explore transformational business models? Would you carve out a part of your current business/market to serve as an ongoing real-world innovation lab?
A few words of advice about using these questions in the real world… Tread lightly, since no CEO likes to be put on the spot and drilled with a laundry list of questions. Pick a few of the ten to put into your own words to help you discern whether the company you work for, or are thinking about working for (or with), has a leader who shares your appetite for transformational innovation. Better to know what kind of environment you’re going into in advance than to learn painful lessons later.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 11, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET You probably haven’t heard of Richard LaMotta but I bet you have heard of and enjoyed his innovation, the Chipwich ice cream sandwich. I rank the Chipwich right up there on my list of all-time favorite innovations along with Guttenberg’s printing press and Apple’s iPhone. Like most great innovations the Chipwich didn’t require inventing anything new, just recombining existing elements in a new way to deliver value. What could deliver more value than sandwiching soft vanilla ice cream between two, large chocolate chip cookies? As if that isn’t innovative enough add in the piece de resistance, rolling the whole thing in chocolate chips! Now that’s innovation. LaMotta died last week and his classic entrepreneur story is worth remembering and celebrating.
LaMotta was ahead of his time in 1982 when he deployed unheard of guerilla marketing tactics to take the idea for Chipwich from a retail confectionary store called The Sweet Tooth in Englewood, New Jersey to selling 200,000 per day across the country at its peak. The name Chipwich came from an early crowd sourcing effort when LaMotta held a contest offering a year’s supply of the product to the winning contributor. A student from New Jersey came up with the winning name and was rewarded not only with a year’s supply of the tasty treat but also put through college by the company for her contribution.
LaMotta had a vision to take the Chipwich national but was told by marketing “experts” that it would take $50M in working capital that the company didn’t have. No worries, LaMotta took the campaign to the streets of Manhattan, literally, deploying street cart vendors complete with identifiable pith helmets and khaki pants. They created an innovative sales channel without the help of the experts establishing a new product category for premium handheld ice cream and an attractive new price point breaking the $1 barrier. Prior to Chipwich hand held ice cream products were low quality and low cost. Vendors consistently sold out of Chipwiches and the price point continued to move up. Fortune 100 food giants approached LaMotta to use the carts as a trial medium for their own products.
Chipwich went viral without the help of today’s social media platforms. Imagine the tweets. Chipwich received an estimated $50 million of earned advertising exposure receiving thousands of free endorsements. Mayor Koch even posed for a publicity photo, for no fee, as he took a big bite of a Chipwich. It was an attractive David vs Goliath story that the press ate up. LaMotta says he gained 30 pounds just doing free media interviews.
LaMotta learned the many hard lessons of entrepreneurship along the way, twice filing for and then emerging from bankruptcy, as the knockoffs came fast and furious. He also learned first hand what happens when an entrepreneur mixes it up with the world of large corporations. LaMotta laments what he called large corporate “analysis to paralysis” syndrome and cautioned aspiring entrepreneurs about the importance of non-disclosure agreements. In 2002 with a nationally recognized brand, more than a billion Chipwiches sold, and 3700 vendors in 36 markets, he sold the company to Coolbrands International, a Canadian distributor, who also owned the Eskimo Pies brand. Coolbrands then in turn sold both brands to Dreyer’s, a subsidiary of Nestle, who discontinued making the Chipwich because they already had another brand in the category. Like most entrepreneurs LaMotta struggled with losing control of his baby.
LaMatta was a classic entrepreneur who never quit. He said it best, “I got out there, I went for it, and persevered through the rough times.” He did indeed. Chipwich is a great innovation story. Rest in delicious peace, Richard LaMatta.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Nov 4, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET I’m not much of a car guy but when Ford announced it was dumping its Mercury line I got a little nostalgic. I wasn’t born when “Rebel Without a Cause” was released in 1955 but remember seeing the movie as a kid and being in awe of James Dean. Who can’t relate to the lonely rebellious outsider, with his slicked back hair and leather jacket, trying to fit in? No one remembers the name of the character Dean played (Jim Stark). After a tragic death James Dean became the character in our minds for eternity. Don’t get me started on Natalie Wood. The thing everyone remembers and the real icon from the classic movie is the cool Mercury James Dean drove. It was a 1949 six-passenger coupe, fitted with a V-8 and an attitude to match Dean’s character. The Merc was coolness personified.
Don’t you wonder how the Merc became so cool coming from Ford where Henry’s motto was, any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black. The Model T was the iconic product of a new industrial era. Henry Ford gave us the assembly line and mass production. He didn’t give us cool. For that you have to look to his only son Edsel, who had a better idea. I know we associate the name Edsel with failure but that is because of a disastrous Ford model that was introduced in 1958 well after Edsel had died in 1943. Edsel Ford was not a failure.
Edsel was far more interested in design and flashier styling for cars than his father. He relentlessly advocated for more modern cars reflecting consumer tastes to replace the Model T but was consistently overruled by his father. It wasn’t until sales of the Model T started to decline that Edsel began having influence on car body design and performance specifications. He was very interested in high performance cars and many give him credit for customizing the first “Hot Rod” with a V-8 engine. In 1939 he started the Mercury brand from scratch. It was a way to offer consumers a car that was more stylish than a Ford at a price point between a Ford and the luxury Lincoln brand. Edsel brought the power of design to Ford and had a big impact on the auto industry.
 Mercury really took off with the introduction of the 1949 model, the Mercury Eight. Not only did it become famous as James Dean’s ride in “Rebel Without a Cause” it quickly was popular with car customizers. Maybe it was an early example of open source innovation. An entire ecosystem of hobbyists and suppliers grew up around customizing the 49 Mercury. Hot Rod and Motor Trend featured pictures and stories about the coolest chopped Mercs. Hobbyists today still customize old Mercs and there are fiberglass replicas in production that are popular with today’s kit car and hot rod enthusiasts. Not many cars have had that much staying power and impact.
Unfortunately Mercury’s heyday was in the 50′s. It hasn’t been interesting since with few remarkable models. I am not surprised that Ford is dumping the brand. It has no clear positioning in the market. I can’t think of a single person I know who owns one. While it makes sense for Ford to consolidate its brands and platforms it didn’t stop me from a little nostalgia when I heard that Mercury, the messenger of the Gods, had a simple message for the brand, you’re fired. For all rebels without a cause it is worth taking a moment to remember what the 49 Merc stood for.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Oct 28, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET My friend and Boston Globe innovation columnist, Scott Kirsner, has launched an interesting new on-line platform for corporate innovation executives. You will want to check out and subscribe to Innovation Leader where you will find lots of food for innovation thought and where this post originally appeared.
I used to think that if I just yakked long and loud enough, I could convince CEOs to embrace transformational innovation. It took me 25 years as a road warrior consultant, author, and accidental government bureaucrat to realize that proselytizing doesn’t work. If leaders don’t want to change, all the consulting jargon and fancy PowerPoints in the world won’t convince them to.
In those situations, no matter what lofty rhetoric the CEO uses in public or at company retreats about “creating an innovation culture” and encouraging everyone to think outside of the box, the best result you can hope for are incremental innovations to improve the performance of today’s business model. You never get transformational new business models — and you always get frustrated if you were hoping for bolder change. If you want transformational innovation, you have to find leaders who want transformational change and are receptive to organizing differently for tweaks than for transformation. After learning this lesson the hard way over many years, I no longer try to convince CEOs who don’t want to change, and instead try to find those CEO’s who do.
 Here’s my list of 10 questions you can ask a CEO to tell if they are really serious about transformational innovation:
1) Do you agree transformational innovation goes beyond breakthrough products to include business model innovation — entirely new ways to create, deliver and capture value?
2) Will your employees tell me that failure is a career-limiting move, or that the company celebrates experimentation?
3) How much time do you spend strengthening and protecting the current business model, versus designing the next one?
4) Do you have clear and discrete objectives for both incremental and transformational innovation? Do you organize differently for each?
5) Does your organization invest in R&D for new business models as it does for new products, services, and technologies?
6) Are you prepared to have your organization disrupt itself? How do you see that playing out?
7) Do internal ideas and projects that threaten to cannibalize the current business model get squashed — or nurtured?
8) Do you have a process for allocating resources for transformational innovation projects that lies outside of the control of business units?
9) Do executives with responsibility for exploring transformational business models report to you, or to another line executive responsible for today’s business?
10) Are you willing to create a sandbox to explore transformational business models? Would you carve out a part of your current business/market to serve as an ongoing real-world innovation lab?
A few words of advice about using these questions in the real world… Tread lightly, since no CEO likes to be put on the spot and drilled with a laundry list of questions. Pick a few of the ten to put into your own words to help you discern whether the company you work for, or are thinking about working for (or with), has a leader who shares your appetite for transformational innovation. Better to know what kind of environment you’re going into in advance than to learn painful lessons later.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Oct 21, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET I was amused to learn that the show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ is doing away with the phone-a-friend lifeline. There was Meredith Vieira with her big smile and syrupy voice explaining that the time had come to take away the lifeline that has been a staple since the beginning of the show because too many friends were using the internet (doing Google searches) to help the contestants. No kidding. Did the show’s producers just figure that out? It was plain to see the progression from the early years of the show when contestants would call wicked smart people to today when they just call people that are really fast at doing on-line searches. What’s next, “ask the audience” to check their iPhones at the door of the studio? Let’s face it lifelines are enabled by the web. Should we just get used to it or is there something more important than a game show going on here reflecting on the state of human interaction.
This comes as no surprise to anyone with a teenage daughter. When is the last time you shouted to your teenager, Get off of that phone you have been talking for an hour? It is far more likely that you have said, get off of that computer and do your homework or no text messages during dinner. It is obvious that phone-a-friend has been replaced with text messaging and Facebook walls. Phone conversations have been replaced with an always-on lifeline connecting friends in real time. Answers, information, advice, entertainment, and connections are all available 24/7. Conversations are now just fragments, short poorly spelled text messages, or 140 character epithets.
Is the loss of phone-a-friend necessarily a bad thing? Maybe new web-enabled lifelines are expanding our universe of possible friends and opening up new opportunities for deep engagement. I think that may be true but there are serious questions that need to be asked about real human engagement. I worry that the web and social media platforms have become the driver more than the enabler. Are we “friending” people because they are web-savy, spending a lot of time on social media sites, and quick to return our text messages? Or are we “friending” smart, interesting, caring people that leverage the web to enable connections and who will be there when you need them the most? Will these connections stand up to the crises that we all will face when personal engagement and support is critical? Is “friending” even the same thing as being a friend? I wonder if we have become so focused on our follower or friend counts on-line that we are forgetting what true friendship is really about.
Seems to me that lifelines are more about the people at the other end of the line than about a connection to the web. Technology is a great enabler that can help us to be better friends but it is not a replacement for the hard work of being a good friend. There will be times in all of our lives when we will need to say, I would like to use a lifeline. If it is all right with you I would like to hold on to my phone-a-friend.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Oct 14, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET If I had a dollar for every person I have driven crazy popping those addictive plastic bubbles…….. Today marks the fiftieth birthday of Bubble Wrap, the ubiquitous stress reducer disguised as a packaging cushion. Did you know that this pop icon (pun intended) has over two million Facebook fans? Did you also know that its inventors parlayed Bubble Wrap in to the juggernaut, Sealed Air Corporation, with over $4 billion in revenue operating in 52 countries? My favorite part of the story is that the inventors didn’t set out to create packaging material at all. Bubble Wrap is a classic innovation and unintended invention story.
Bubble Wrap provides us with an almost too good to be true invention story beginning as the movie script demands in a Hawthorne, NJ garage in 1957. The narrative begins with two entrepreneurial-minded engineers, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, who set out to invent plastic wallpaper with a paper backing. They thought there would be a market for plastic textured wallpaper. Yuck. Thank goodness there wasn’t. Company legend has it that Chavannes came up with the idea for Bubble Wrap while coming home from a business trip and his plane was approaching the Newark Airport. He was staring out the window on the descent and it seemed to him as if Newark was cushioned by the billowy clouds surrounding the city. And you guessed it the rest as they say is history.
I love this story. It reminds us of how most innovation happens. Creating new ways to deliver value requires combining and recombining ideas and capabilities across silos in new and unexpected ways. Our current assumptions and approaches to problem solving and solution development are never adequate. It is only when we open ourselves and our organizations up to the unusual suspects and ideas that we create real breakthroughs. Capabilities developed for one purpose are often underutilized until we learn how to connect them to potential new purposes. We must be open to the possibilities and quicker to experiment with different configurations, which often open up new product, service, and business model opportunities. Our initial set of ideas and approaches are almost always inadequate. Success finds those that put themselves in a position to capitalize on derivative ideas at the margins.
 Let’s virtualize the inventor’s garage. Social media platforms and networks provide us with the enabling technology to quickly connect ideas and innovators across silos. We are getting really good at the connecting and sharing ideas part. What we need to work on is how to create more purposeful networks. We must practice doing more together. Self-organization is the next wave of creativity and creation but we will have to get better at moving beyond the ideas to put the ideas to work in the real world. Our virtual garage is loaded with ideas, tools, and motivated innovators. Free agents are beginning to believe that we don’t need intransigent large institutions to make progress. If purposeful networks can demonstrate progress on solution development and deployment capital sources will materialize.
I sense we are near an inflection point making this a very exciting time to be an innovation junkie. If I am annoying you with my incessant bubble wrap popping, too bad, it keeps me from bouncing off the walls during these exciting times. Happy Birthday Bubble Wrap.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Oct 7, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET  #BIF9 carries a sense of homecoming, a reunion of sorts. The kind where all the crazy aunts and uncles gather, regaling us with tales of adventure and awe. Perhaps the family reunion metaphor is accurate; I believe that innovators are cut from the same DNA. We are insatiable optimists and see opportunity in everything.
We are curious about everything. We know that learning together is the best way to get better faster. We believe in transformation and disruption – both personally and across our industries. We are all storytellers, knowing that stories connect and unite us, and enable us to transform together.
Each year, when I look towards the Summit – this is the promise I see. 400+ innovation junkies, who share this DNA, reuniting. 32 fabulous storytellers will jumpstart your heart and mind, pushing your thinking to the edge. But their stories are just the beginning. Their stories catalyze your conversations and collaborations. I see this happening time and time again from the stage, from the audience, and in the hallways of the Trinity Repertory Company. It is always awe inspiring and overwhelming.
This is what makes #BIF9 special. We don’t need more meetings of the usual suspects; we need the ability to think and act in new ways, laterally across silos and disciplines. The world doesn’t need incremental progress; it needs wholly new possibilities born from disruptive, creative people working together in entirely new ways.
This is our promise, catalyzed every year at the Summit. #BIF9 is really your platform – to plug in with your fellow disrupters. Your conversations and collisions will mold it and shape it. We trust this implicitly. We merely create the conditions for something beautiful and purposeful to emerge. The rest is up to you.
Welcome to the family.
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Sep 30, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET How many times has your boss said, no surprises? Bosses want everything to go down exactly as planned. Of course they never do. Maybe instead of trying to avoid surprises we should plan more of them. When is the last time you genuinely surprised someone? Did you delight a customer today with the element of surprise? Did you do something so totally unpredictable that people all around you took notice? Predictability is overrated and boring.
When the Saints tried an onside kick to begin the second half of the Super Bowl everyone on and off the field was taken by complete surprise. I thought at the time that the game was over right then and there. The key was the element of surprise. If you look at the statistics behind onside kicks it was a genius move by Sean Payton, the Saint’s head coach. Turns out that only 26% of onside kicks in the NFL work when they are expected late in the game. The success rate goes up to 60% if the ploy is unexpected. The Saints not only had the underdog, post Katrina thing, working for them the odds were in their favor. The onside kick was a brilliant use of surprise and the Colts never recovered from it.
Lady Gaga is all about the surprise. We expect her to surprise us with her look and art every single time. Lady Gaga delivers. Her appearance at the Grammy Awards was no exception. Whether you are a Lady Gaga fan or not you have to be impressed with her capacity to surprise, provoke, and entertain. Her outfit at the Grammy’s was unlike any I have ever seen and her duet with Elton John was equally memorable. Lady Gaga is determined to be remarkable and to consistently surprise. No easy task to be surprising when everyone is expecting you to be. It isn’t my favorite genre (if you can call her music a genre) but I have to hand it to Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta for being surprisingly entertaining.
My friend Tony Hsieh has built an incredible movement and company at Zappos. The company is built around the simple idea of surprising each and every customer with service beyond expectations. It seems so logical and yet most customer service is awful and disappointing. Not service from Zappos. Just ask my wife and daughters who have been delighted on many occasions ordering shoes from the company.
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Saul Kaplan: Surprise!
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