Medici Effect for Sales Innovation....

I received a lot of feedback to my blog on “Know Thy Customer”. Specially noteworthy was the Dunkin Donuts example. One of my friends and blogger Rishi (http://rooshi.blogspot.com/) brought out an interesting point though. Do I always need the same cup of coffee and sandwich? What if I was thinking of a latte and a donut? Or may be I didn’t need a coffee at all?

In larger context, from a sales relationship standpoint it raises the following very pertinent questions:

1. Are you able to innovate and bring services that delight the client?

2. How do you drive innovation in a borderless world?

Bottom line “Are you feeding the clients the same menu or able to take them on a thrill ride of innovation?”

I will try to answer this question through a very interesting phenomenon called the “Medici Effect”. Frans Johansson coined this term. In my own words, Medici effect can be defined as “ When a very diverse group of human beings are put together for a common task, the environment produced can be an intersection for ground breaking innovation”.

I recently attended a webinar given by Frans and I must tell you it was an hour very well spent. He brings to the table some really interesting examples of intersections. For eg:

1. How a nest of termites and largest building in Harare have a common intersection for innovation!

2. How a 24 year old chef went onto become the youngest 3 star chef in New York city (in case you don’t know the restaurant scene in NYC, this is the equivalent of becoming the CEO of Fortune 500 company by 24)!!

3. How the latest Router from a leading telecom company and a trail of ants are principally the same!!!

If you are intrigued, I suggest you pick a copy of this all time best seller. The Medici family was one of the most influential families that controlled Florence in 1700’s. This family like all power centres does not have a really clean track record. However what they did was to provide an environment where in artists and thinkers of a very diverse background got together under one roof to work together. Way back then they would assemble teams from China, Siberia and all kinds of remote places to bring out some amazing works of art. Some of the prodigies that came out of this set up include the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci…

Frans took inspiration from this and went onto discover how diversity led to innovation. Some other amazing examples he covers are:

1. How do spiders and goatmilk come together for human diseases?
2. Why is HP’s quantum lab the most innovative place on the planet for HP?
3. What do MLK jr. and rock music have in common?
4. How the ipod mini’s and old transistor radio’s of 60’s essentially the same?

So taking inspiration from Frans, I have decided to embark on a journey of exploring how diversity can yield the most innovative sales solutions for my clients.

For starters a few ideas:

1. In my current solution pitch I am bringing in a really diverse team of software developers, architects and project managers from India and US.

2. In the next year, I will bring into my team a few people from engineering (guys who have been in industries like metals and cement) to work with a software engineering team.

Dream wish:

Get a team consisting of poets, microbiologists, software engineers and building architects to build the next generation complaint resolution system.

Hope this has been good food for thought.

Let me know how the reading on Medici Effect goes for you….

Cheers

Uday