Last month I gave a talk called The Anti-MBA at MADsemble in Lahore. It’s about where original ideas come from, why most companies have so few of them, and why AI is about to make them far more valuable. The video is now up, so if you have half an hour, here it is: If you’d rather have the highlights first, here are a few of my favourite bits. The trophies under the stairs Years ago, when I worked at Ogilvy South Africa, the agency was trying lots of ways to get people excited about digital. Like every agency, we had a shelf of awards in reception, almost all of them for TV and print. Young people walk past that shelf every day and quietly work out what the place really values. So, as an experiment, we hid the TV and print trophies under the stairs and put up anything remotely digital or interactive in their place. We didn’t announce it. Within about three weeks, briefs for plain print ads were coming back with interactive ideas attached. Behavioural scientists call this a descriptive norm. We take our cues from what we can see being rewarded, far more than from what we’re told in a memo. How-To Fridays Once or twice a month, on a Friday, we invited someone with nothing to do with advertising to talk to the agency. We had a brain surgeon explain how the brain works, graffiti artists, and an Olympic hockey player who, for reasons I genuinely can’t remember, ended his session partly undressed. It went down very well. At one of these, a creative team got chatting to a techie from a phone company. They had a half-formed idea about letting the public vote on things. He told them it was easy and explained how. That chat helped make the Carling Black Label Cup possible. South African football fans were convinced they knew their teams better than the coaches, so the campaign let them prove it. Using a code under the bottle cap and their mobile phone, fans picked the starting line-ups for Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, and even voted on a live substitution during the match. They cast more than 10.5 million votes in seven weeks. Why curiosity compounds Every new thing you learn can connect with everything else you know. Learn five unrelated subjects and there are 10 possible pairings. Learn 40 and there are 780. Your competitors read the same trade press as you, so their connections look a lot like yours. The ideas they can’t copy come from the odd combinations only you have. Targets or experiments? Researchers Gerard Seijts and Gary Latham ran a business simulation in which some teams were told to do their best, some were given a hard market-share target, and some were told to find and try six or more new strategies. The teams told to experiment came out on top. On a complex task, a goal to learn beats a goal to hit a number, because a hard target pushes people to grind away at what they already know. Try this Once a week, read, watch or listen to one thing from well outside your industry. Once a month, turn one idea into a test cheap enough that you don’t need anyone’s permission. Keep no more than about six running at once, and kill the duds quickly. Look at your shelf. Whatever your office, Slack channel or all-hands celebrates is what people will make more of. Change the shelf and you’ll change the work. Invite a stranger. Get one person from a completely different world to your next team meeting and let them talk about what they do. AI is about to make best practice everyone’s practice. The 1% that’s yours alone has to come from somewhere, and in my experience it often walks in on a Friday afternoon. Want to delve deeper? The talk opens and closes with my great-great-grandfather hanging off a cliff in Iran, and I wrote that story up in my notes from the day. The ideas behind the talk come from The Anti-MBA, the course I made with London Business School’s Jules Goddard. Source: Seijts, G. H., Latham, G. P., Tasa, K. & Latham, B. W. (2004). Goal setting and goal orientation: An integration of two different yet related literatures. Academy of Management Journal, 47(2), 227–239.