By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jan 29, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Want to have a brighter future? Here’s how.
Have a “Growth Mindset” –as opposed to a “Fixed Mindset.”Mindset is a simple idea discovered by Stanford professor, Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., in decades of research on motivation, achievement, and success.
Mindsets are beliefs individuals hold about their most basic qualities and abilities.In a Growth Mindset, people believe they can develop their brain, abilities, and talent.
This view creates a love for learning, a drive for growth and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishments.  On the contrary, people with a Fixed Mindset believe their basic qualities, such as intelligence and abilities are fixed, and can’t be developed.
They also believe that talent alone creates success, and see effort as a sign of weakness rather than as a positive element of life needed to reach one’s full potential.
The diagram above shows how people with different views of intelligence behave in different situations.
(Thanks to Lee H. Baucom for teaching me about this theory and doing it in such a memorable and meaningful way).
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jan 28, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Dear Avis: If you want to win big with the Zipcar acquisition you will have to try harder.
Resist the temptation to impose your core car rental business model on the upstart transformer. Zipcar is your sandbox to scale a car-sharing model with potential to disrupt the automotive and car rental industry. Stop with the number two shtick, Zipcar can help Avis become a market maker instead of a share taker. Your main competitor, Hertz, is a share-taker demonstrated by its recent acquisition of Dollar Thrifty. Your opportunity is tremendous but throw away the classic post-merger integration playbook. Here are five ways to do that:
It isn’t about Avis. It’s about Zipcar
 Change your lens. It isn’t about you. Zipsters aren’t your current customers. Your business model, renting cars by the day or week, isn’t designed for Zipsters. Start by understanding their experience and view the world through the lens of Zipcar’s business model, which provides members with access by the hour to a network of shared cars. You aren’t buying a platform to improve the Avis business model. You are buying a new business model that will benefit from access to Avis capabilities. ZipCar was struggling to scale its model and Avis can help. This is about enabling more Zipsters and improving their car sharing experience.
Innovate Through A Connected Adjacency
Scaling Zipcar without suffocating its nascent business model will require both autonomy as well as access to resources and capabilities from the core. Set Zipcar up as a sand box adjacent to the core. Give it plenty of room to operate independently. The more disruptive the new model the more line-executives from the core will try to undermine its success. Autonomy doesn’t mean Zipcar should operate in isolation to the core. It’s imperative to build strong connections so that people, ideas and capabilities can flow in both directions. This tricky balance requires significant CEO involvement to run interference on what will be many inevitable conflicts and tension points.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Dear Avis, Please Don’t Screw Up Zipcar
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jan 21, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET Learn by doing. Constantly test new ideas. Learn, share and repeat. The world is ever changing — stay ahead of the curve. Embrace the art of discovery.
We need to try more stuff. Innovation is never about silver bullets. It’s about experimentation and doing whatever it takes, even if it means trying 1,000 things, to deliver value. Business model innovation requires a lot more experimentation than we are comfortable with today. Tweaking existing business models won’t work. Technology as a sustaining innovation may improve the efficiency of current business models but will not result in the transformation that we all want and need. We need to learn how to leverage technology for disruptive innovation and to experiment with new business models.
Geoffrey Canada, the inspiring founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone in NYC, reminds us of the importance of constant experimentation. Everyone wants to know the one thing that makes a program like Harlem Children’s Zone successful. What is the silver bullet that will allow the program to be replicated with ease across the country? We are always looking for an easy answer. There is no silver bullet and it is not easy to transform any business model or social system. According to Canada, at Harlem Children’s Zone it is doing 1,000 things with passion to help those children succeed. It is about focusing on the customer, in this case, the children within 100 city blocks in Harlem and doing what ever it takes to help them secure a bright future. There is no one thing.
Business model innovation is all about experimentation. It is about combining and recombining capabilities from across silos until something clicks and value is delivered in a new way. It is never just one thing. It starts with a big idea that gets the juices flowing and attracts others with similar passion to the new approach. The big idea has to be translated from the white board on to a real world test bed to demonstrate that the idea is feasible. Starting small and demonstrating progress is key to building credibility and expanding a network of interested stakeholders. An ongoing portfolio of small-scale experiments to fail fast on those without merit and to prioritize those with the potential to scale is critical.
We also must get far more comfortable with hacking capabilities. Capabilities are the amino acids of innovation. They are the building blocks that enable value delivery. Innovation is a better way to deliver value and is often the result of repurposing existing capabilities. Locking capabilities into rigid organization structures and proprietary closed systems gets in the way of unleashing new sources of value and solving many of the important challenges of our time. Innovation is about hacking capabilities. Business model innovation happens when we enable random capability collisions resulting in new and unexpected ways to deliver value.
A good example of the power and potential of hacking capabilities is Microsoft’s (MSFT) Kinect. Microsoft introduced Kinect in November 2010 as a product extension to its Xbox franchise. Kinect adds a very cool capability for Xbox game players by getting rid of the hand held game controller and turning players into their own controllers. Microsoft and cool haven’t been used in the same sentence for a long time. Kinect is cool.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Experiment All the Time
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jan 18, 2013 at 3:01 PM ET In the wake of No Labels’ historic Meeting to Make America Work! of 1,300 citizen problem solvers and leaders in New York City last week, Washington has torn a page out of the No Labels Make Congress Work! action plan and announced support for a No Budget, No Pay concept that would dock pay for members of Congress if the Senate can’t pass a budget.
In December of 2011, No Labels introduced the No Budget, No Pay Act in the House with Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and with Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) in the Senate. It had over 90 co-sponsors in the 112th Congress, and received a hearing in the Senate in March of 2012. This bill has been pushed by No Labels’ hundreds of thousands of grassroots supporters — Democrats, Republicans and everything in between — with 88 percent approval ratings from voters, who want more accountability in Washington.
“No Budget, No Pay is a common-sense idea that should gain the support of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate — because it’s not one party or the other that needs a budget, it’s America that needs a budget,” says No Labels Co-Founder Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“The House GOP leadership has evidently decided to endorse the No Budget, No Pay concept,” No Labels Co-Founder and former Comptroller General of the United States Dave Walker says. “This is a major step forward to helping ensure that the Congress passes a budget and is held accountable if it fails to do so.”
Do you support “No Budget, No Pay”? Then tell your Senators and Congressman RIGHT NOW. Click here for an easy link to let your Congressmen know how you feel.
No Labels is a grassroots movement of Democrats, Republicans and independents dedicated to promoting a new politics of problem solving.
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Tue Jan 15, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET “India is cheap,” has been stated so many times that it must be true. Have you ever seen evidence though? Before visiting I heard anecdotes that it is cheap, things such as “a hotel costs $1/night” and, “I spent less than $5 per day.” Even though millions visit India annually, I never found any evidence of how cheap it was until I actually visited myself. Continuing on with our careful book keeping, while in India we tracked our daily spending, item-by-item, to understand how much India costs. After four months in India I can definitively say, India isn’t necessarily cheap.
Here are the numbers, broken into cost per day of countries we’ve visited. The bold numbers are the lowest amount for each major travel category. In a couple cases I excluded outliers that I know aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons. For example, the “Accommodations” and “Food” costs of Nepal are skewed because many trekking hotels provide accommodation for free if you purchase your meals there, therefore the actual costs of each category is a blend of the two. Sri Lanka’s “Sightseeing” costs are similarly skewed, therefore excluded from being called the lowest cost. As you can see, while India is the second cheapest country we’ve visited overall, in no individual category is it cheapest.
BEHIND THE NUMBERS
The reality behind the numbers further dispel the myth that India is cheap. The quality of budget travel experiences in India is shockingly low. When paying similar prices to other countries, budget travelers in India receive substantially less quality, comfort and safety for the money. India is correctly referred to as cheap because it is not a good value. Here are some examples of how little money in India gets you even less.
The bathroom of the most expensive place we stayed in India, $20/night in Kolkata. After fighting a brilliant battle the cockroaches won. We ceded the bathroom to them and used the shared bath.
Read the rest of…
Erica and Matt Chua: Is Indian Travel Really Cheap?
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Jan 7, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET When a consumer product company wants to know how a new product or new marketing campaign will perform, it doesn’t rely solely on traditional market research surveys. It goes to test markets. It’s the right way to discover how the innovation will go over in real market conditions, without the risk of a national or global rollout. It also provides the test bed for optimizing the marketing mix to support the full-scale launch. Actual market experience, veteran marketers will tell you, never quite matches the results of quantitative and qualitative market research reports and what consumers say they will do behind the two-way glass of a focus group facility.
So here’s my question: Why don’t more firms employ the same approach to explore and test newbusiness models?
Anyone can map out new business model ideas on paper. It’s easy to do pro-forma analyses of how a new business model might work. And it’s not much more work to write up a fancy report embellishing on the potential of a hypothetical new business model. But until a business model idea sees the light of day in the real world, it is impossible to know if it will really work.
Just talk to any successful serial entrepreneur about their experiences in starting new businesses. They almost never get the model right on the first try. It takes several iterations to find a business model that works on the ground and has the potential to scale. Most will tell you it’s a waste of time writing a detailed business plan outlining all the components and how they’ll interact. The better approach is to sketch out a business model concept on the back of a napkin, build a prototype, and then move as quickly as possible into the market to see whether it holds water.
The idea is to move as quickly as possible from concept to prototype to test, and then iterate until you land on a business model configuration that works and is ready to scale. Along the way there will be many failures. The trick of course is to fail fast and to capture learning that can be applied in the next round.
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Saul Kaplan: Put Your New Business Model to the Test
By Saul Kaplan, on Mon Dec 31, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Collaborators are everywhere. You will find them in the gray areas between silos. Just look up from your current business model. Seek out difference and gather often across boundaries, disciplines, and sectors. Be open and be curious. Beware of random collisions with unusual suspects. Unless, of course, if you want to learn something new. In that case seek out innovators from across every imaginable silo and listen, really listen, to their stories. New ideas, perspectives, and the value creating opportunities are in the gray areas between the unusual suspects. And yet we spend most of our time with the usual suspects in our respective silos. We need to get out of our silos more.
It is human nature to surround ourselves with people who are exactly like us. We connect and spend time with people who share a common world-view, look the same, enjoy the same activities, and speak the same language. We join clubs to be with others like us. The club most worth belonging to is the non-club club. The most valuable tribe is a tribe of unusual suspects who can challenge your world-view, expose you to new ideas, and teach you something new. A tribe of unusual suspects can change the world if it is connected in purposeful ways.
It is easy to see the potential from enabling random collisions of unusual suspects. Just check out any social media platform.
Read the rest of…
Saul Kaplan: Random Collision Theory of Innovation
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Dec 27, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET Thought for the day.
A friend admonished me for not planning well. She’s right. Up to a point.
The keys to any plan are to 1) plan ahead; 2) plan strategically and 3) execute that plan flawlessly.
If you can only do two of those three things, pick planning strategically and executing flawlessly. You don’t have time for the most thoughtful plan, but a strategic plan developed on the fly is better than no plan at all.
If you can only do one, there’s not much of a point. You could choose executing flawlessly a non-plan but that’s not really possible. You could choose creating a strategic plan but if you can’t execute it, what’s the point? And you could plan to plan, but why bother?
However, if you are a “planner” and can only choose one, you’ll probably choose one anyway because planners like the illusion of being organized and often-times like to simply plan for planning’s sake. And that’s fine. If you are one of these types and not very flexible, pick whichever one of the three makes you most feel like you are actually doing something constructive and “planning” —since they are all equally useless. At least you’ll feel better about yourself and be less frantic about your non-plan.
On the other hand, if you can’t do any of them at all (and are cool with that), find me and we’ll hang out and find a way to have a better time than those crazy planners,
Just to spite them.
Of course, we don’t really want to spite them because we’ll eventually need their help in getting a ride back to wherever we started since we didn’t plan on having a car or write down the address of where we were staying or where we are going. So if you aren’t a planner, at least keep a planner nearby.
Always.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Dec 26, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET 
#TeamJYB3:
My New Year’s New Dietary Math Resolution.
Or what dieters can learn from economists
“Constant dollars” is terms describing income after adjustment for inflation, as opposed to “Actual dollars.”
Inflation (monetarily speaking) is about 2-3% a year. Weight increase follows a similar metric throughout life.
So, for example, if someone weighs, say, 190 pounds and gains, say, 4 pounds for the year….when adjusted for weight inflation, there is no “net” weight gain.
In terms of “real pounds” Sure, there may be some additional “actual pounds” but those have to be accounted for properly and haven’t been by most dieticians in the past—who obviously lack an understanding of econometrics.
 So, for example, this year, I actually lost one pound (when adjusting for inflation). I’m not commenting on “actual pounds” because they are no longer relevant to a more realistic and obviously much more sophisticated understanding of human weight measurement.
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After spending the first three weeks of my diet traveling and celebrating the holidays, I got ready to weigh myself.
Stepped on the scales.
And decided that “It could be worse” should actually be result that should register on my scales .
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Dec 21, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
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